The Hero with a Thousand Faces Analysis

Call it Middle Earth or Panem. Call it Hogwarts or Gotham City. Call it the Merry Old Land of Oz, or a galaxy far, far away. Call it the corner bodega at 4:30 next Tuesday. Wherever it is, it's les...

This is nonfiction, so the question of the narrative technique doesn't play the kind of role that it would in a novel about, say, a boy named Harry (hero!) meeting an old fogey named Dumbledore (me...

Put on your best serious-scholar black turtleneck and your studious wire-framed glasses: we're getting philosophical.The Hero with a Thousand Faces is straight-up philosophy, demonstrating a keen w...

Campbell's here to enlighten rather than entertain us; the stories he's discussing can do plenty of entertaining on their own (as proven by the box-office returns on sagas like Harry Potter, Star W...

Again, think university lecture here. Campbell wants to deliver the information as expediently as possible, and dude doesn't have time to worry about getting all flowery or poetic. He dips heavily...

Any book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces is likely going to conjure up some kind of Voltron-on-steroids image of a giant monster dude with a thousand little heads making up one big one. Lucki...

"To My Father and Mother"We get a heavy dose of Freud in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, with gods, goddesses and monsters all representing some kind of grappling with the gifts and anxieties we al...

The ending actually comes as…a bit of a downer. You get some sweet heroic returns and happily-ever-afters in heroic sagas, but not in a heroic academic saga about heroic sagas.After expounding up...

We're going to level with you: this is not an easy read. For starters, it can seem like Mr. Campbell really needed the timely services of a good editor and a lot of red pens. Sometimes the book get...

Goin' on a TripThe book doesn't conform to typical narrative forms; it's just a long and kind of rambling discussion about mythology. But the discussion itself focuses on a framework for storytelli...

Normally we'd break this down according to one of the handy-dandy plot devices provided by Mr. Booker. But the thing is, all of them come from the same place: this very book. If you squint a little...

If the Hero's Journey follows classic plot analysis, then the cosmogonic cycle follows the three-act structure. So we're going to give this section over to it. The first part of it – or the first...

The Hunger Games, a true Campbellian story, was actually inspired by one of the myths Campbell uses to kick off his whole book: Theseus and the Minotaur. Author Suzanne Collins just replaced the bu...

Honestly? It depends on how you look at it. The mythic cycle that Campbell discusses is actually super concerned with the act of knocking boots, both as a goal unto itself and as a means of reprodu...

Hoo boy. Campbell gives us a lot of them, so don't hold it against us if a few slip through the cracks. Campbell loves specific examples, and any chance he gets to include one will be doubled down...