Summary
The monomyth, or hero’s journey, is the idea that hero stories across cultures share one pattern: a hero leaves the ordinary world, meets trials in a strange one, wins something and brings it home. Joseph Campbell, a scholar of comparative mythology, set it out in ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’ (1949), borrowing ‘monomyth’ from James Joyce.
His hero “ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder”. Campbell modelled the pattern on rites of passage and saw in it a shape for a life as well as a plot. Asked in 1983 about a woman’s version, he replied: “Women will have to tell us”.
Rationale
Campbell looked for the one story beneath all stories; Part 1 is “not arguing for a ‘single story’”. His lone hero worries us too: it makes individual triumph feel like the natural shape of change.
Diagram not reproduced here (rights reserved) — see it at jcf.org ↗