A Practical Guide

Summary
In this section of "The Writer's Journey," Christopher Vogler introduces the work of Joseph Campbel. Campbell through his text, "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," describes the journey of a typical hero and describes how there is a common historic structure on most of the epic stories. He remarks the similarities between heroes of different parts of the world and different time periods and how their stories have a similar structure. Vogler recreates Campbell's sequence in a way that is more applicable to modern films and heroic stories. At the same time, he provides very valid examples for each of the steps of the sequence that he introduces. In general, he intends to provide a better framework that will help modern readers analyze this type of stories in a more efficient manner.

Reaction
I was not familiarized by Joseph Campbell's work before reading this text and it is really fascinating the way how he structures this kind of stories. When I was going through the different parts of the sequence, I though of a million examples that suited the structure that he presented. It is really interesting, as well, to have in mind this narrative structure for future readings. This may represent a better understanding of the key points and may contribute to the analysis of the reading's different segments. I also liked the part when he analyzed how appealing was this structure for everyone. The sequence provides the reader with everything he/she wants from an epic story.

Reflection
Since the moment I started reading the article, I thought of one of my favorite epic stories, The Odyssey. And I went through the different steps of the sequence analyzing them based on this literary classic. This made everything much more interesting, and it is really fascinating to discover how clear the sequence is, when you relate it to a story that you really like. In Western Heritage during my freshmen year, when we were studying the Odyssey, I had to prepare a timeline and expose it to the class. It is a very dense text and it took me a while to complete it, but it gave a better understanding of each step of Odysseus' journey. Now I realize how similar is its structure to Vogler's sequence.