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In 1949 the American scholar Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces, borrowing the word monomyth from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Building on Edward Burnett Tylor, Otto Rank and Lord Raglan, he described one story pattern in three acts, departure, initiation and return, divided into 17 stages. The episode walks through the call to adventure, the refusal of the call, the belly of the whale drawn from the story of Jonah, the road of trials, atonement with the father and apotheosis, and links them to Carl Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious.

The template then moved into Hollywood. George Lucas modeled early Star Wars drafts on Campbell, the 1988 PBS series The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers made the ideas famous, and Christopher Vogler’s seven-page Disney memo became The Writer’s Journey, a 12-step guide for screenwriters. The episode covers the heroine’s journey through Jane Eyre and Cupid and Psyche, Kim Hudson’s The Virgin’s Promise, and the critics: folklorists who say Campbell cherry-picked his myths, and David Brin’s warning about the American monomyth’s lone violent savior.

• In Star Wars, the trash compactor scene on the Death Star is offered as a belly-of-the-whale moment.
• Arthur C. Clarke was reading Campbell while co-writing 2001: A Space Odyssey with Stanley Kubrick.
• In Jane Eyre, Mr. Rochester plays the temptation role, and Jane returns to him only when she can do so as an equal.
• A 2023 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that framing one’s life as a hero’s journey increased a sense of meaning and resilience.
• One scholar dismissed the monomyth as a generic Campbell Soup that erased the local flavor of individual myths.