Volger 175-194

Gregory Dwyre
Pledged
Annotated Bibliography

Vogler, Christopher, and Michele Montez. The Writer's Journey : Mythic Structure for Writers. Boston: Michael Wiese Productions, 2007. 175-194.


In this section we are getting near the end of the heros journey. After the heros big ordeal and conflict there needs to be some sort of reward or prize. In this section Volger talks about what he calls the reward and the road back which follows. I liked the way Volger started off talking about the reward by saying no matter what at this point you, yourself have become a new person and then goes on to describe what types or rewards you could get and how characters celebrate or don’t. The most common situation after a ordeal is a celebration by the hero where energy needs to be replenish be it physical or mental energy, Volger says that a common and good place for this is around camp fires. Now an important concept is that after the ordeal there is some sort of reward and the hero gets this by one of two ways,; stealing or having it given to them. Along with good experiences with an ordeal there are some bad ones where the hero may pretend like nothing happened or have an over bloated ego. The next step is the road back, where two basic things can happen, either you go back on your own will or are chased back by a reoccurring villain or new trouble. The road back basically is the journey back to the original old world and the new challenges on the way whether it be a villain that you never finished off or a new problem.
I found the whole idea the main conflict not always being resolved by the ordeal to be strange. I feel that the ordeal should be the climax of the movie and so the point in which the problem is fully solved. I can understand when its only for a second or two that the villain seems to be coming back to the top. In our lives there are plenty of situations where you do a half job and it comes back to bite you in the butt but I don’t think that these situations are the major ordeal in your life. So I have come to the conclusion that during the ordeal the main problem is dealt with and fully finished so that the hero has no further problems.


1)Can the road back home leave you in the new world and as a viewer do you think this a positive or negative thing?
2) Do you think that because we are so used to the hero surviving the journey and makig his way home that when this doesn’t happen we atomically disapprove, ex I am Legend.
3) The lessons or changes that occur in a hero, does the reader identify more when the hero sees his own changes or when other characters see the chages and act differently?
What is an example of Magic flight on the return home