In this article, we will compare Arya Stark’s journey through Game of Thrones to Campbell’s monomyth paradigm and attempt to answer four questions: first, does Arya’s journey fit into the monomyth at all? Second, if Arya’s journey fits the framework, how closely does it mirror the traditional experience of the Campbellian Hero? Thirdly, what clues can the monomyth offer us about her character’s future in Season 7 and beyond? And lastly, is Arya a Hero, or is she something else? THE HERO’S JOURNEY, PART I: DEPARTUREġa) WORLD OF COMMON DAY: the hero, unfinished and incomplete, lives in her ordinary world before receiving the call to adventure. “The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero’s passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women.” -Joseph Campbell Joseph Campbell’s model applies to members of both sexes because the archetypes symbolize all humanity. Let’s address a threshold question first: can the Hero’s Journey apply to Arya, who as a woman could be called a heroine? As we discussed in our article on Daenerys Targaryen, yes it can.
Martin, who steeps his stories in mythology, it seems impossible that he could completely avoid Campbell’s theoretical ballpark. It is a flexible, living idea, a suggested blueprint of how mankind’s greatest myths bubble up and out of the shared human condition, rising from our shared subconscious across space and time, and even deeper than that, from the structural depths of the very cosmos themselves. Martin has often said that he hates the predictability of traditional story construction, so why apply the monomyth to Game of Thrones? The Hero’s Journey is not an unassailable formula carved in stone on the side of a pyramid.
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This article deals only with the TV show version, which means the book stories and characters have been altered-telescoped, pared down and folded into each other in a variety of ways, and influenced by the increasing creative input of producers David Benioff and D.B. Please note that what we are looking at here is how the Hero’s Journey fits the Arya Stark character as she is presented in Game of Thrones, NOT in A Song of Ice and Fire. Joseph Campbell sums up the monomyth concept below:Ī hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from his mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons upon his fellow man. It’s important to remember that the Campbellian Hero’s Journey paradigm is highly flexible, so not all stages need appear in order or appear at all, while others flow through many other stages. Her dark nature and training as an assassin raises the question: is Arya Stark a hero at all? She is brave, resilient and confident, but she is also a revenge-obsessed killer fascinated by violence and death. Thrown into the dark crucible, she grows up before our eyes. Isolated almost entirely from every other storyline since Season 1, her lonely journey has taken her across continents and provided her with a powerful set of Mentors, Threshold Guardians and trials. A traumatized and orphaned daughter of the Stark family clan, Arya Stark’s experience on Game of Thrones is unique.
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