Odyssey Hero's Journey

In both “Big Fish” and “The Odyssey” the authors Daniel Wallace and Homer use the impossible, mythical challenges Odysseus and Edward Bloom go through and how they use their courage and cleverness to outsmart the challenges placed in front of them to define the Hero's Journey. The authors demonstrate countless components of the Hero’s Journey throughout their stories, but today I’m going to focus on two main pieces of the Hero’s Journey, Trials and Crisis. In ”Big Fish" Daniel uses how Edward utilizes his tricky wordplay to prevent Karl from ravaging the town to show the Trials part of the Hero’s Journey. While in “The Odyssey” Homer uses how Odysseus tricks Polyphemus in order to escape to exhibit the Trials element of the Hero’s Journey. …show more content…
In “Big Fish” when Edward finally escaped No-Name Land he had nowhere to stay, so instead he improvised and “slept under the stars on a bed of pine straw.” But little did he know this is where “fate’s hand first tugged on your father’s belt loops. For as he slept he was come upon by two men-of-the-woods, who beat him within an inch of his life and took from him every last dollar he had.” Yet through all that misery after a long night's rest Edward “began walking, no longer knowing or caring where he was going, but just walking, forward, onward” and by withstanding all the discomfort he finally made it to a country store, where he recovered and continued on with his life. As mentioned in the text above, we know that this is when Edward was at his lowest low, he had nothing, and was lucky to have that little bit of life left, demonstrating an example of Crisis in “Big Fish”. In “The Odyssey” when Odysseus, his crew, and his boat were struck down by Zeus Odysseus was left stranded, the sole survivor, and because he had no boat he “lashed the mast and keel together, made them one, riding my makeshift raft as the wretched galewinds bore me on and on.” And when Odysseus thought that all the trouble was over, he didn’t know the worst was still left to

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