The Hero's Journey In The Odyssey By Joseph Campbell

The Heroes Journey, identified by American scholar Joseph Campbell, is a pattern of narrative that describes the typical adventure of the main hero, whether that be a fiction or nonfiction hero. The first step is the call to adventure, where something shakes up the hero’s current situation and the hero starts experiencing change. Consequently, this theory is also applied to the fictional hero Odysseus in The Odyssey and the real-life hero Martin Luther King Jr., a civil rights activist. In The Odyssey, Odysseus embarks on a 10-year voyage from Troy to Ithaca and encounters many monsters along the way including a gigantic Cyclops described as “…a brute so huge, he seemed no man at all…” (9 89-90). Martin Luther King Jr. was a minister and a

For Odysseus, the call is when Helen, wife of Menelaus gets kidnapped and indulges in an affair with Paris, Prince of Troy. To get his wife back, Menelaus gets Agamemnon to form an army to set sail for Troy “Agamemnon raised an army and set sail for Troy” (Schmoop.com). Odysseus is called to the war and he initially refuses because he wanted to be with his wife Penelope and newborn son, Telemachus. To get out of it, he fakes insanity. The king is calling him to adventure by shaking up the situation and like the Heroes Journey states, he refuses the call by faking insanity. For Martin Luther King Jr., the call is after Rosa Parks refuses to move to a different seat on a bus in Montgomery. On the night that Parks was arrested, King met with E.D. Nixon, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to plan a citywide bus boycott (Biography.com). King doesn’t refuse and responds by stating “We have no alternative but to protest..” during a speech. Rosa Parks is calling King to adventure since she is shaking up the civil rights scene due to her refusal to move seats. Unlike what the Heroes Journey states, King doesn’t refuse the call and instead, he flat out says “We have no alternative but to

An ally is a person who assists someone else and a mentor is a person who looks over or teaches someone else. Odysseus has several allies, one of which is Athena. During Book 17 of The Odyssey, Athena disguises Odysseus as a beggar in order to surprise the suitors “She disguises him as an old man, so that he can surprise the suitors…” (13). Athena is an ally towards Odysseus because he is cunning and a strong warrior, which causes Athena to favor Odysseus since Athena is the goddess of war. For Martin Luther King Jr. however, he didn’t have one ally in particular. Rather, he had a huge community of African-Americans on his side taking part in non-violent protests. Although not an ally, Gandhi was a major mentor to Martin Luther King Jr. Gandhi was very inspirational to King because of his non-violent protest and it was what influenced King to go visit India. King stated, “There is another way... as modern as Gandhi saying through Thoreau, that 'non‑cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good” (Raab). King’s trip to India inspired deeply inspired him, which increased his commitment to America’s civil rights struggle (Biography.com). King along with Bayard Rustin, another rights activist who also studied Gandhi, would become the main organizer of the 1963 March on Washington