Is Every Story Like This?

[Karoka]

Is every good story based off the Hero's Journey?

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Flame Blade

Is every good story based off the Hero's Journey?

No, in fact most aren't, though it does have the distinction of being the base of a lot of bad ones.

Sara Mayhew does a better job than I explaining how the Hero's Journey stems from anti-Enlightenment reactionary thought, and is really a poor way to tell a story nowadays- indeed, it's only survived up until this point because of tradition.

[Harehunter]

I found that Christopher Stasheff had a very interesting idea of melding fantasy with a scientific explanation and discourse on political systems.

[Alorael at Large]

For one thing, not every good story is a fantasy epic. Most stories aren't about heroes, period.

 

—Alorael, who doesn't even think good fantasy has to be about the hero's journey, and he's not sure the hero's journey isn't so generic it covers many widely differing tales. But there's also plenty of antiheroic fantasy now. There's political fantasy, which can have heroes who aren't really on journeys of any sort. And, well, no. Not all novels follow the archetypes.

[Dintiradan]

It's not universal by any stretch, but most traditional folklore and a lot of fantasy in general follows it. Personally, I think the Monomyth works the same way that the "rules" of poetry work. You can make very good poetry by breaking the conventional rules, but you have to know the convention before you break it effectively.

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

Sara Mayhew does a better job than I explaining how the Hero's Journey stems from anti-Enlightenment reactionary thought, and is really a poor way to tell a story nowadays- indeed, it's only survived up until this point because of tradition.

That article makes Harry Potter sound awful. That's not so good when you're trying to make it an example of a better model than the Hero's Journey.

Dikiyoba.

[Actaeon]

No, but at http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheHerosJourney you'll find many that are. Careful, though. TV Tropes is one of the internet's greatest time sinks.

 

Edit: Eliminated unnecessary bits of the URL, then added this unnecessary bit of commentary.

[Slawbug]

It legitimately warmed my heart to open this thread and discover everybody responding to the initial question with "no."

 

Here's my version:

 

No. However, the Hero's Journey is easily connected to almost any story. This is not because there is anything special about it. Rather it's because each element of the Hero's Journey can be interpreted to mean almost anything. Thus, although you have a number of elements in a specific order, you can fit most stories into it no matter what their content is, simply by squishing and stretching your interpretation of what that story's literal elements signify.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

It legitimately warmed my heart to open this thread and discover everybody responding to the initial question with "no."

 

Here's my version:

 

No. However, the Hero's Journey is easily connected to almost any story. This is not because there is anything special about it. Rather it's because each element of the Hero's Journey can be interpreted to mean almost anything. Thus, although you have a number of elements in a specific order, you can fit most stories into it no matter what their content is, simply by squishing and stretching your interpretation of what that story's literal elements signify.

 

so basically it's a much cruftier version of freytag's triangle

[Slawbug]

Yes, exactly.

[Dintiradan]

Huh. I never knew that thing had a name.

[Alorael at Large]

Except Freytag described the actually fairly standardized form of what was, even in the 19th century, classical drama and classic drama. It's still broadly applicable, but not always, and I don't think Herr Freytag would try to apply it to modern theater, much less novels. I'm not even sure he applied it to contemporary plays.

 

—Alorael, who could also apply Aristotle's Poetics, which is actually pretty good at describing Greek tragic drama and pretty bad at describing most other things. And he could propose Alorael's Theory of Fiction: stuff happens to some people and they do some stuff. Sufficiently broad to cover most, though not all, fiction. Also useless.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Revenge of the Irked

Except Freytag described the actually fairly standardized form of what was, even in the 19th century, classical drama and classic drama. It's still broadly applicable, but not always, and I don't think Herr Freytag would try to apply it to modern theater, much less novels. I'm not even sure he applied it to contemporary plays.

he didn't but lots of other people apply it to everything

[Dikiyoba]

Freytag's triangle is so general that it's useless for analyzing fiction. However, it's still important for writing fiction. It's a lot easier to write stories that follow more complicated structures if you have the basic triangle down.

 

Dikiyoba.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba

Freytag's triangle is so general that it's useless for analyzing fiction. However, it's still important for writing fiction. It's a lot easier to write stories that follow more complicated structures if you have the basic triangle down.

Dikiyoba.

I only bother reading fiction whose narrative structure provides a good approximation of fractal behavior.

[Metatron]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba

Freytag's triangle is so general that it's useless for analyzing fiction. However, it's still important for writing fiction. It's a lot easier to write stories that follow more complicated structures if you have the basic triangle down.

Dikiyoba.

I only bother reading fiction whose narrative structure provides a good approximation of fractal behavior.

Syntax is highly recursive. Does syntax count as structure?

"Dantius crushed the rebellion." vs "The rebellion crushed Dantius." I'm pretty sure that grammar affected narrative in that sentence.

[Ceiling Durkheim]

In fairness, Joseph Campbell didn't say that the Monomyth/Journey of the Hero (with a thousand faces, natch) was applicable to everything, either. He said it was a form common to all hero tales (a major subset of mythology and folklore), not modern fiction. Granted, even that is a fairly contentious claim (and one I don't entirely buy), but I'd rather not put words in his mouth regarding the scope of his ideas. He discussed some modern fiction in light of this structure every now and then, but he was more interested in the applicability of mythic concepts to real life.

 

Some authors have deliberately patterned their work after the Campbellian monomyth (George Lucas comes immediately to mind), and a heroic fantasy and space opera sci fi resemble it in some ways, but that's still a pretty narrow cut of fiction. I'm in agreement with what others have said or implied on here: fiction is sufficiently broad that any principle that encompasses all fictional narrative is going to be so broad, vague, or obvious as to be uninteresting.