Percy Jackson Hero's Journey

Heroes exist in all stories, though all stories have different types of heroes. The most common types of heroes are Aristotelian tragic heroes, modern tragic heroes, anti-heroes, and archetypal heroes. In Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief, Perseus Jackson, the protagonist, is an archetypal hero because he adheres to the departure, initiation, and return of the hero’s journey.

The first part of the hero’s journey is the departure, which Percy Jackson’s story follows. Percy’s call to adventure was defeating his math teacher, who turned out to be a Fury from the Underworld. Though this was not the first unnatural thing that had happened in Percy’s life, this was the incident that changed his life. Unfortunately, Percy did not want his life

His road of trials primarily consists of his run-ins with Medusa at Aunty Em’s Gnome Emporium, Echidna at the St. Louis Gateway Arch, and Procrustes the stretcher in Los Angeles. All of these situations were challenging ordeals, which Percy had to walk into without minimal knowledge of, even with Annabeth’s help. Furthermore, after jumping into the river at the Gateway Arch, Percy had his meeting with the goddess. In this case, the goddess was a sea nymph who reminded Percy that Poseidon was on his side and provided help for later ordeals. In the Underworld, Percy could have saved his mother and left one of his friends, or even himself, behind, yet he chose to finish his quest and find Zeus’s lightning bolt instead. This was his temptation from the true path, proving that he is worthy of being a hero. While trying to solve this case, he reached the apotheosis of this arc; he defeated Ares in battle. In defeating a god in battle, Percy proved himself to be godlike, more so than merely being the son of Poseidon. After learning that Ares had the bolt the whole time, Percy returns it to Zeus, meeting with Poseidon and finishing the book on good terms with his father. The ultimate boon for Percy in this book was understanding that his mother and his friends were capable. Overall, Percy’s arc in The Lightning Thief conforms to the initiation of the hero’s

Percy’s magic flight was when the bolt turned up in the backpack in the same way Riptide returns to his pocket. As the original plan said Hades stole the lightning bolt out of jealousy, finding the bolt in the backpack truly threw off the heroes, especially since Hades proceeded to accuse them of stealing not only the lightning bolt but also his helm of darkness. This magic flight led to his rescue from without, where he and his friends used the pearls from the sea nymph to escape the Underworld. He crossed the return threshold when he went back to Camp Half-Blood after taking the lightning bolt back to Olympus. While Camp Half-Blood may still be rather new to Percy, it quickly became a place of comfort and solace to him. He became the master of two worlds in being able to switch between living at Camp Half-Blood and going to a normal school during the school year. Both the normal world and the demigod world have become known to him, though they are still two different parts of his life. Percy’s freedom to live was in his realization that he is indeed a powerful demigod. Though Percy was skeptical of this throughout the book, with his father being one of the Big Three, Percy quickly learned that he was a force to be reckoned with. All in all, Percy’s return satisfied the hero’s journey