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Hero's Journey

Decent Essays

The Hero’s Journey Elizabeth Lane
Back to the Future (1985)

The hero’s journey is an outline that maps out stories and adventures. It is used to describe a layout of events, whether they are mundane or not. These steps can be applied to almost any adventure. The popular movie Back to the Future is a perfect example of just that.

The call to adventure is a plan or accidental point in the hero’s life where they realize everything for them is going to change. In this case, the call to adventure is completely accidental. The hero, a teenager named Marty McFly, is called to adventure when Doc, a friend of his, creates a time machine out of a car. Doc is about to travel when he is …show more content…

He was trying to find a way to Doc’s house when he accidentally stopped his parents from meeting and falling in love. Instead, his mother falls in love with him. Also, the plan Marty and Doc come up with to get Marty back to the future does not go as smoothly as planned. The car runs on nuclear energy, which they have no access to. They do come up with a plan where they will harness energy from a lightening bolt that is planned to strike the town’s clock tower at the end of the week. He does eventually get his parents to attend a school dance together where they originally fell in love while slow dancing. Though it seems as though everything is going well, the guitarist playing cuts his hand open and makes it almost impossible for them to finish the set. Marty covers for the injured player and finishes the set with the band. In the beginning of the story, Marty displays his love for the guitar, but he has a fear of people not liking his music. Marty’s biggest fear of all was playing the guitar in front of a crowd of people, which he had to do in order for his parents to slow dance and fall in love. This displays the abyss, or the greatest challenge of the journey. The challenge is so great that the hero must give their self completely to the quest, and lose their self in the adventure. When Marty returns back to 1985, he also returns to a completely different town and life. This perfectly exemplifies the transformation and revelation in the hero’s journey. Here, the hero becomes transformed and has a revelation about the world around their self. Because of Marty’s effect on the past, town he lives in is better and so is his family. His parents are much happier and terrorists never killed Doc. Also, the petty problems he was having before do not exist. Similar to the transformation and revelation is the atonement. The atonement is a process where the hero accepts their transformed self and is

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