Joseph Campbell's Monomyth and The Dying West

A major goal of our semester was looking at the ways that Western Fiction breaks down our conception  of what the West is like, contrasting the myths and legends of grand heroism with a more realist view of the struggle and desolation that is found there. Something that I have noticed and wanted to discuss was  the ways that American Western Fiction does fit into the norm of trajectory for literature. Maybe I've just been too affected by reading Joseph Campbell's theories on the 'monomyth', but I thought it was really interesting the way our "cowboys" fit into the trajectory that he outlines for the archetypal hero in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In most (if not all) of the books that we've read, the hero must leave his home in order to find himself and grow into his Hero role -- or not, which is where the commentary on the West comes in. (More context for this trajectory can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Writer's_Journey:_Mythic_Structure_for_Writers.) When stripped down to the bare skeletons of plot, the underlying similarities between the All the Pretty Horses, Ox-bow Incident, The Surrounded, McTeague (and others) become apparent, making it easy for us to draw connections between them and form a coherent opinion about the vision of the West that these authors are trying to demonstrate to us. I also think that the commonalities are the reason why we've been able to make so many multi-media connections in class, between our stories/characters and other novels, television shows, movies that share those base qualities. In looking at the ways that convention is challenged, it can be helpful to look at the ways that it is not in order to form a fuller picture of what message is trying to be portrayed. The fact that the protagonists in these novels share such structural similarities to protagonists in other media yet cannot succeed/thrive in the West helps to convey that the West itself, as a space, plays a heavy hand in the societies that form and survive there. Based on what we have seen, the West, though a major ground for intersectionalism, is not a place where this can grow into something productive.