The Hero's Journey Paradigm

Joseph Campbell is known to be the creator of the Hero’s Journey paradigm. Where an individual leaves the known world to an unfamiliar world.The hero then faces difficulties in the process that make them a stronger individual, learning from their mistakes and becoming well aware of both their ordinary world and unfamiliar world. “Again and again I vowed that someday I would end this hunger of mine, this apartness, this eternal difference; and I did not suspect that I would never get intimately into their lives, that I was doomed to live with them but not of them, that I had my own strange and separate road, a road which in later years would make them wonder how I had come to tread it” (Wright 126). Heroes have to go through a series of obstacles

“The call to adventure is a manifestation of this primal religious experience an emanation from the unconscious” (Hubell). Richard at a young age is forced to take action and not act as a kid because he no longer has a father that could teach him right from wrong, “Though I was a child, I could no longer feel as a child, could no longer react as a child” (Wright 86). After his mother got terribly ill he realizes that he has to grow up and do the job that his father refuse to do.”Other expatriates refuse the call, but their companies force them to accept assignments abroad” (Osland). His mother has a condition that affects her ability to work to maintain her kids and Richard becomes aware and changes his mentality on things to attempt to provide for his family. His mother is the only family member that actually believes in him and she is really all he cares about he becomes well aware of the world and has a plan. He has a dream of becoming a writer and going North to leave all that has brought him down in the South. “My mothers suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness, the painful, baffling, hunger­ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking, the uncertainty, the fear, the dread ; the meaningless pain and endless suffering. Her life set the emotional tone of my life, colored the men and women I was to meet in the future,

Yet a new hate had come to take the place of the rankling racial hate” (Wright 369). Since Richard is younger racism is one of the biggest struggles he has to face and facing it alone for the most part is the most difficult. In the South he saw everything different as if he has a new chance to live in a place where he can look at a white person and not feel in danger. He finally becomes aware of the world and how it really is a cruel place in the 1940’s. This stage in the hero’s journey is the master of the two worlds. “I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown, to meet other situations that would elicit from me other responses. And if I could meet enough of a different life then perhaps, gradually and slowly I might learn who I was, what I might be” (Literary Companion Series 178). After being in “both” sides of the world back then where life is pictured completely different in the South, Richard believes that in both places there are hardships you just have to set goals for yourself and fight to acquire them. Writing is his passion and he fights until he pursue it. “I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger of life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human” (Wright 384). Richard to state what writing means to him and how he can pour out all of his feelings