5/7/2023 0 Comments The ordinary world definitionIn every case I study here, the protagonist is fairly high up in the system-and close enough to see glimmers of the truth and question things when no one else would.ġ984 ’s Winston Smith rewrites history for the Ministry of Truth, and we see that he is good at his job. Unsurprisingly, a Katniss Everdeen in a YA novel is someone like the reader: young, no one special, near the bottom rung of society, and a natural rebel, who then has a traditional hero’s journey to overcome the evil State.īut in the dystopia classic, even though to the protagonist, his world is the ordinary world, he is not an ordinary person. Just as Luke Skywalker starts as a simple farmboy on the bottom rung of society, most heroes achieve greatness rather than being born to it.Īs I mentioned in the previous post, this includes modern, Young Adult dystopias like The Hunger Games. The idea of the ordinary world implies that the hero is also ordinary in some way. However, there is another inversion hidden between the lines. Since this is an inverted story, you might change the name and call it The Oppressive World, where the State controls all and brutally destroys anyone who speaks against it. In the dystopian world, of course, the world is far from ordinary to our eyes, but it is ordinary to the dystopian tragic hero. However, the list I chose is the most intelligible and recognizable version to me and therefore probably is to many of my readers. David Leeming (1981) goes in a completely different direction with a miraculous birth for the hero and preparation for his quest. Phil Cousineau (1990) includes only The Call to Adventure in the first act. Campbell doesn’t include The Ordinary World and adds an extra stage called The Belly of the Whale, which I honestly have a hard time parsing as distinct from The Road of Trials. In my analysis, the Act I comprises the following stages:Īgain, note that none of the major sources parse it exactly this way. The list I’m using combines elements of two of the most detailed versions: the original of Campbell, and that of Christopher Volger (2007). There’s no single way to analyze it, and none of the most common ones (or rather, the ones listed on Wikipedia) quite match up to how I think of it, so I’m using my own interpretation. However, different authors analyze the hero’s journey in different ways, with more or fewer stages in the narrative, and with different labels. Most interpretations of the hero’s journey agree that it happens in three acts: the Departure, the “Initiation” (what you might call the adventure proper), and the Return. In this post, I will lay out Act I of the “inverted hero’s journey” and how the four classic dystopian novels fit into it: We, Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451. ![]() If you want to know more about what I’m talking about, look at the previous post, but in short, I argue that where the traditional hero is an ordinary person who does extraordinary things to save or improve his world, the dystopian hero is the opposite: a successful person who rebels against the State, but eventually suffers a fall from his position and fails utterly. ![]() This is the second post in my series analyzing dystopian literature as an inversion of the famous hero’s journey.
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