Mathew Lumaban

Professor Underwood

RWS 330

Date

A hero embodies an individual blessed with the ability to change a sudden outcome by venturing forward to a self-discovery kind of journey with the eventual hope of creating something worthwhile in the life. Although most heroes’ journey is seen to be uniquely independent of each other Joseph Campbell buts forth the narrative that this is apparently not the case but rather all heroes’ stories follow the same pattern of how exactly a hero behaves. Thus this pattern of continuity begs a question about destiny and fate. The main question being are we in control of our own destiny or does fate alone subjugate us. Taking into account that such a philosophical question is beyond doubt a philosophical conundrum Joseph Campbell takes it upon himself to try and answer it the best way possible by comparing various accounts from well key know individuals. Joseph Campbell outlines up to 17 stages that makes up a hero’s journey in his book ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’ also well known as the hero’s journey. Borrowing from the works of James Joyce and Finnegan Wake, Campbell eventually fully illustrates his theory of monomyth. His work not only explores 21st century fiction but it also takes into account old folklores and mythological works of past authors. Although his main work is to sum up most stories into a single common factor among all of them he does come up with a main concluding factor a common conclusion he agrees upon. Campbell’s eventual conclusion is that hard work is the only determinant to success and thus the ability to see or determine an individual’s future is not at all possible or even highly likely to be done.

To fundamentally prove this logical conclusion of this he takes several examples in order to prove this phenomenon and none is more prevalent than ‘The Goodfellas’ that was made only possible by Martin Scorsese. Elements of Campbell’s history and past can be explained as he tries to adequately explain all the common factors that make up every single story he had learned about in the course of his life. Taking into account that his introduction to stories and folklores began at a young age he eventually comes up with a common theory of how all various stories are structured. Although his final conclusion contains 12 parts each explaining the eventual hurdles a hero has to undergo they are further categorized into 3 acts so as to ensure they are fully condensed into a format that is easily understandable (Bronzite,2018). The first act is termed as the ordinary world which acts as our beginning area before the hero begins his journey. This act contains five fundamental parts for a hero which are a) the ordinary world, b) Call to adventure, c) Refusal, d) Meeting with the mentor, e) crossing the threshold. The second act is the special part which contains parts such as a) Tests, allies and enemies, b) Approach to Inmost Cave, c) Ordeal, d) Reward, e) the road back. The third act returns us to the ordinary world but with different parts such as a) Resurrection, b) Return with Elixir,

Henry hill acts our protagonist into the ‘The Goodfellas’ in which we follow his life journey simply to explore how it adversely affects his eventual growth into a hero especially in such a mafia like life setting. Its seems that from the offset of his childhood at the tender age of 11 his criminal life was an all too assured eventuality that was going to happen (Viano, 1991). His introduction into the mafia life as a ‘go-fer’ gives us our first look at the hero in the ordinary world before his eventual cross-over of the threshold in an incident of him being caught selling cigarettes that were stolen and his refusal to tattle tale on his friends which later on leads to his entire gang going to the court house to celebrate thus showing clearly that Henry has become one of them. The second act which contains our twists and turns of the stories with instances of obstacles which affect out protagonist profoundly such as instances of robbery and burying bodies with minor ones as trying to keep both his wife and girlfriend happy (Viano, 1991). As the story progresses further other tests occur for Henry such as lying to Paulie about the drugs and his conclusive inability to stop this behavior.

Campbell excluded a lot of information from this story so as to focus centrally on the hero in order to show the specific description of the protagonist that he saw necessary. By including key specific description Campbell made sure that the book in one way or another is a reflection of the movie. His eventual way of turning the three villains of the movies into the heroes is and adequate description of genius that he continuously describes throughout his book.

Work Cited

Bronzite, Dan. “The hero’s journey–Mythic structure of Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth.” Retrieved on February 1 (2018).

Viano, Maurizio. “GoodFellas.” (1991): 43-50.