Joy Luck Club Hero's Journey

965 Words2 Pages

The Joy Luck Club Essay
If you saved someone’s life, the people would praise you as a hero. Heroes appear in just about anywhere in the world whether in books, stories, or even our lives today. If you asked a child who are their heroes, they would most likely say a character's name like Spiderman or sometimes their parents. “A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself,” Joseph Campbell told Bill Moyers during a six-hour PBS series. After many theories and studies, Joseph Campbell, author and professor of literature, deciphered a pattern in almost every hero’s story and developed a cycle called the hero’s journey. In his book, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, even though there are twelve stages, Campbell …show more content…

In the chapter, “The Rules Of The Game”, Waverly enters the abyss including her magical touch at winning chess when her mother, Lindo, keeps silent after the argument they had at the supermarket. Afterwards, Waverly consistently lost her chess matches resulting in the end of her career as a chess champion and the discontinued communication with her mother. Throughout her own life, she spent it in the abyss until the day she decided that she wanted to tell her mother about her engagement to Rich but has difficulty trying. "You don't know my mother," I said. "She never thinks anybody is good enough for anything." (Tan 280). This shows that Waverly knows how her mother is and doesn’t believe that Rich will be acceptable. An example of the abyss in Waverly’s chapter is “I was despairing over this latest failure, made worse by the fact that Rich seemed blind to it all. He looked so pathetic. So pathetic, those words! My mother was doing it again, making me see black where I once saw white. In her hands, I always became the pawn. I could only run away. And she was the queen, able to move in all directions, relentless in her pursuit, always able to find my weakest spots.” (Tan 293 ). Finally, she hits the return stage when she finally confesses that she’s getting married even though Lindo already knew that and comes back with the “prize” of communication with her

More about Joy Luck Club Hero's Journey

Open Document