Archetype Of The Hero's Journey

Joseph Campbell, American mythologist, writer, and lecturer, says, "It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” In other words, Campbell believes that an individual must leave the comfort of his ordinary life and battle hardships to discover his true mettle. Often the environment or something in it keeps an individual from changing, from growing—in short, from living—until something else forces him into action. To grow, people must recognize their limited worlds for what they are; they must realize the need for change and they must have the courage to try. Individuals must journey out of their ordinary worlds of comfort and certainty to face their own personal weaknesses, limitations, and fears in order to attain self-knowledge, the ultimate life treasure. This individual journey of discovery is the narrative archetype of the Hero’s Quest found in literature.

O’Brien is a bright young man facing a moral crisis. The year is 1968; he is twenty-one years old and he has just completed college when he receives his draft notice to serve in Vietnam. Up until this point in time, the Vietnam War has been an intellectual abstraction with no tangible basis in his reality. However, the arrival of the draft letter rocks his comfortable world and fuels a summer of moral confusion that propels him to run away to avoid the ensuing circumstances. Thus, he begins his own heroic quest. One might argue that rebellion against social conventions and the expectations of family and friends propels Tim O’Brien to embark on a personal journey of self-discovery that mirrors the mythic Hero’s Quest, where the hero leaves his ordinary world and faces formidable fears to attain the essential, yet sometimes humbling, reward of