Wild moneyless hero Chery1 Strayed and Joseph Campbell - Essay Example

Joseph Campbell explains ‘the call to adventure’ as “a blunter wild moneyless hero Chery1 Strayed and Joseph Campbell merest chance-reveals to an unsuspected world, and the individual is drawn into a relationship with forces that are not rightly understood” (56). In addition, Freud states that blunders do not represent the mere chances, but they result from suppressed conflicts and desire. He further states that, blunders are ripples on one’s life surface resulting from unsuspected springs.

Cheryl Strayed clearly depicts this in her story when she loses her mother due to lung cancer. The life of Cheryl Strayed gets into a downward spiral those results to her family’s destination, heroin addiction, and compulsive adultery. In order to survey, the wreckage of her family and her life at 26 years of age and newly divorced, Cheryl Strayed decides to 1,770 kilometers alone along the Pacific Crest Trail (from California to Oregon). The reason of this hiking is that, Strayed thinks that through hiking she will think about her entire life and family and find her strength once more, far from all that made her life ridiculous.

Unfortunately, Strayed candidly admits that her journey does not succeed as she had planned. This is also evident in Joseph Campbell’s theory of the hero in the second phase of initiation (Campbell 23). Joseph Campbell shows that for one to become a hero he or she must pass through many trials. This is evident in the subcategories of meeting with the goddess, the apotheosis, the ultimate boon, woman as the temptress, and atonement. According to Joseph Campbell, “this is a favorite phase of the myth adventure… it has produced a world literature of miraculous tests and ordeals” (81).

Joseph Campbell in his theory of the hero asserts that for one to become a hero he or she must admit to some trials and challenges (Campbell 21). Cheryl Strayed highly supports and portrays this argument in her story. Even before the