Summary Of Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces: Monomyth

In Joseph Campbell’s famous book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he wrote, “[There] will always be the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told” (Campbell 1). Through this statement, Campbell is describing the main idea of his concept known as “monomyth”. The idea of the monomyth explains a similar series of steps that nearly every hero or protagonist follows throughout their journey. Whether it be characters from classic works of the past or characters from new movies filmed in modern day, every hero from literature follows the monomythic outline in one way or another. It was this concept that propelled Joseph Campbell towards being a well known name by scholars all across the globe. Long before Campbell described his idea of the monomyth, he was an ordinary child born on March

Using experience from helping write these works, as well as experiences and information he learned throughout his entire life, Joseph Campbell wrote his well renowned and award winning book The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949. It was here that Campbell described the idea of the aforementioned monomyth. The Joseph Campbell Foundation describes the monomyth as, “a universal pattern that is the essence of, and common to, heroic tales in every culture” (“About Joseph Campbell”). This is largely true, as Campbell’s monomythic concept follows a specific set of 17 steps to every hero’s journey. The steps are encompassed and divided amongst three larger stages: The Departure, The Initiation, and The Return. Each of these stages include important steps that every hero or protagonist takes in all forms of literature, including mythology, movies, books, and