The Problem with The Hero's Journey Paradigm

            After Joseph Campbell realized and voiced the similarities between myths, legends, and stories across many cultures, he believed that we, the audience to those stories, could use the structure and stages that were present to give our own lives meaning. But Campbell missed something crucial: the stories and legends that we love so much are not real, they are made up. The creators of those stories, try as they may to create something that is realistic, can only create fiction, because fiction is what their audience wants to hear. Who would want to read about the mundane boring occurrences of daily life, and more over who would want to write about them. We crave not another dose of realism, but an escape, and so there is little reason for the events that transpire in the stories to which we escape to have much connection with the real world. Those stories are so idealized that nothing like them can ever happen in our world.

            Who are our heroes? They are athletes who dazzle us with their superhuman feats. They are soldiers who die to save their loved ones. They are politicians who have brought on great change. But the number of those heroes whose journeys even remotely resemble the hero’s paradigm are a drop in the bucket when compared to those whose don’t. The only thing that is different about the stories that do follow Campbell’s archetype is that we enjoy them more, and then tell them to our friends, and they enjoy them more, who tell them to their friends.

            Room is fiction. There is no escaping that fact. Emma Donoghue was not writing a true story, but making up her own. So, like it or not, the specific events that make us think of Jack or Ma as heroes that follow the Hero’s Journey paradigm are fake.

            There is no kind way to say this, but you will not follow the hero’s journey. Nor will I. And do you even want to? The heroes themselves don’t seem to be having much fun. Yet, if you are like me, you still want to be a hero. What do you think? Am I right to believe that Campbell’s Hero’s Journey can never happen in the real world? That when we think of that paradigm we aspire to be and do things that have been produced not for reality but for mass consumption? Or am I missing something?