Heroic Contemplation

Is Odysseus really a hero? This question has come up in my mind several times in class discussions recently. To me, he seems more like a guy who's just along for the ride in a journey that the gods are providing him. Some gods hate him, some gods love him, and he is like a pawn in their game of power. The examples are plentiful. He is always being told what to do or being forced to do something against his will, and once he finally overcomes one set of obstacles another comes up. For example, Circe tells him to sail past the sirens and then Scylla and Charybdis. Zeus then forces him to stay for a month on the island of the Sun, Thrinacia, and that causes his men to starve and eat the Sun god's cattle which in turn makes Zeus punish the crew even more. Like I said, Odysseus seems more like a guy who goes with the flow of the gods, not really a character with much say in the matter. The reason I started thinking about whether we could classify Odysseus as a hero or not stemmed...

One of the hero's journey narratives that has had a large impact on my life has been from the movie Kung Fu Panda. Apart from the comedic appeal of Jack Black, the movie resonated with me because of the lessons that the main character, Po, learned along the way. Based in a village in ancient China, the animated Kung Fu Panda movie (I will just be talking about the first one) centers around the adventure of a panda named Po. Po grew up revering the art of kung fu and the kung fu masters that live next to his noodle shop. When he is named the next dragon warrior, or kung fu prodigy, he is thrown into a whole new world where he must learn how to fight in order to save his village. Thus, he is an example of "an ordinary person elevated by circumstance into a heroic position." Many of the basic elements of the hero's journey outlined by Joseph Campbell are present in this movie. Some examples of which are the ordinary world (life in the noodle shop), the call to adventur...