The Hero's Journey- a Personal Take

    “The hero's journey” is something I find myself thinking about a lot in a personal sense. The stories we consume about the hero’s journey contain great escapades, mighty stakes, and heroic protagonists. Even if these stories seem unrealistic, personal meaning can still be drawn from them.

A prime example of the hero’s journey is Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. When reading the novel, especially part one, I couldn’t help but draw parallels between it and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, specifically the movie because it’s been a while since I read the book and it’s too long for me to feasibly reread any time soon. The similarity between the two in this case comes from the heroes themselves. Siddhartha, in Siddhartha, is a young religious man who is destined for greatness. His community holds him in high regard due to his father being a Brahmin and due to his own religious achievements. Siddhartha is dissatisfied with this life however because he feels as though his community’s practices have devolved into dogma, and he can’t truly find enlightenment there. An opportunity arrives in the form of Samanas, a group of wandering priests living detached from reality. He sees this as a path to begin enlightenment, and sets out to the world. Now how is this similar to The Hobbit? In Bilbo’s case, he too needed to find his “enlightenment”. Bilbo was living comfortably in the Shire, the homeland for his race, the Hobbits, a people who value comfort and slow, easy days. Bilbo craved adventure however, and was dissatisfied with his life and the values of his community. In this way Bilbo and Siddhartha are similar, and furthermore Bilbo too had an impetus to set him on his journey. His was a group as well, the dwarves and Gandalf. Gandalf brought the dwarves to Bilbo knowing his adventurous spirit. This spirit ended up overcoming him as he took the opportunity he had for adventure and set out on his journey. 

Both of these tales are of adventure and enlightenment, but how is this relevant to us, the consumers of this media? Well, for me personally, I see their actions as something I want to grasp in my life as well. I want to have my “hero’s journey” too, and stories like these draw a common baseline we can learn from. The heroes are dissatisfied with their present lives and communities because their values don’t align, and as such this creates a tension the heroes use to move forward. The momentum to begin that forward motion comes from the outside world, or maybe even the inside one in some cases. In Siddhartha’s and Bilbo’s cases, it was groups that brought them opportunity to find what they were looking for. I suppose, I’m just waiting for that “force” in my life to call me to my hero’s journey.