The Hero's Journey In The Thematic Paradigm By Linda Seger

The concept of the hero’s journey is significantly cliché. It seems that each hero story starts and ends exactly the same way in today’s pop culture. In Linda Seger’s “Creating the Myth,” she gives insight on what makes a hero, how this specific type of hero creates a myth, and the significance the hero has on the story. In Robert Ray’s “The Thematic Paradigm,” he defines two types of heroes in American pop culture: the official hero and the outlaw hero. These two types of heroes are different in their personalities and beliefs, with the official hero being family oriented and the outlaw hero being more individualistic. In George Packer’s “Celebrating Inequality,” he argues that celebrities aren’t heroes, but Americans idolize them as if they

She goes on to discuss other myths that she feels to be important and she reinforces what these other myths represent. These other myths don’t necessarily involve a hero’s journey, but they represent what a hero might need in order to complete his or her journey. All of these myths that Seger describe gives a brief image of what a hero is, in her definition, and the impact that the hero has on the story. For the healing myth, Seger describes the hero’s journey with ten detailed steps. In Seger’s top ten steps that describes a hero’s journey, the very first step is unpopularity that the hero has to overcome. The reader doesn’t know that the hero has any impact on the story at all because the hero is typically an ordinary person: “In most hero stories, the hero is introduced in ordinary surroundings, in a mundane world, doing mundane things. Generally, the hero begins as a nonhero; innocent, young, simple, or humble” (Seger 336). According to Seger, the traditional hero is typically portrayed as a normal person in an attempt to relate to the reader’s perception of a hero. Seger’s attempt to interpret what a hero is shatters the boundaries between a normal person, like the reader, and the hero. Seger implies that the reader is very much connected to a hero and because the reader is so connected to the hero, it influences the reader to keep reading or watching what the hero has to