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Does As I Lay Dying follow the Hero's Journey Template? Yes or no?

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William Faulkner's book As I Lay Dying follows the lives of the Bundrens during and after the Death of Addie Bundren, who was the mother of the Bundren Kids. Throughout each chapter of the book, we are given a different character's perspective of what could be happening in the moment of the book or a story that happened in the past. This book tends to follow each step in Campbell’s Hero’s journey template, but some steps can sometimes be hard to figure out. I think that even though the book sort puts the events into a puzzle, I think that you can still pick out the steps of the Hero’s Journey. Throughout the book, each chapter is a different character, but to make the book even more confusing, the scene that the character is in sometimes changes between the characters. Having different perspectives can definitely make it so that different steps of the Hero’s Journey can be super long. For example, the “Call to Adventure” step. At the beginning of the book, the Bundren Family is...
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Mulan's Journey to honoring her family

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     Joseph Campbell’s template of the Hero’s Journey describes a protagonist in a film or show who goes on an adventure. The Disney Film Mulan has a female protagonist, and usually, with that, the movie follows the steps of the Heroine's Journey. Since Mulan pretends to be a man to join the army in place of her father, I think that this movie can also follow the steps of the Hero’s Journey.      Mulan throughout the movie really wants to honor her family and make them proud. In the movie, she does the opposite and embarrasses them. When the Huns invade China, the king asks that each family nominate one man to join the army. Afraid that her father wouldn’t survive in the war, being that he is old, Mulan disguises herself as a man and joins in his place. This is the “call to adventure” step in Joseph Campbell’s template because this scene shows Mulan officially starting her journey. Mulan, before accepting to go, starts to rethink her decision. Campbell...
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Belle's journey with the Beast

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  Schmidt's Heroine’s journey template describes female characters' transformation, and Beauty and the Beast traditionally isn’t considered a Heroine’s journey. The movie starts out with the Beast being transformed from man to beast by an Enchantress. The movie’s most obvious character journey is argued to be the Beast, but I think that throughout the movie, Belle also has her own journey, which Schmidt's template describes very well. Belle lives in a small village with her father, but she’s always wanted to go out and have an adventure. Schmidt’s template helps understand Belle’s start to her journey through the “illusion of the perfect world step”. Achieving her wish, Belle gets her “realisation” when she finds out that her father has been captured and is locked up in a castle by the beast, and that she has to go and rescue him. These two steps are very important in Belle’s heroine Journey because those two scenes represent the official start to her journey. When Belle ...
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Luke's new life

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       In Star Wars: A New Hope, the movie starts out by showing Princess Leia’s ship getting attacked by the empire. Knowing that she isn’t going to be able to get off of the ship, she sends the plans of the Death Star and a message asking for help in R2D2. Instead of the plans reaching Obi-Wan Kenobi as Leia had planned, the plans fell into the hands of a farmer named Luke Skywalker. Luke does end up finding Obi-Wan, and this is where his Hero’s journey begins. One of the most significant moments in Luke’s Hero’s Journey is when he decides to go with Obi-Wan to Alderaan after he sees his Aunt and Uncle dead. This scene in the movie represents Joseph Campbell's step in “Crossing the First Threshold.” This step shows the official start of Luke’s journey in helping the resistance defeat the empire.      When Luke first meets Obi-Wan Kenobi and shows him Leia's message, Luke at first was hesitant to go on the journey with him. Luke had his whole life in ...
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