"The Hero's Journey," or "the monomyth," originates with Joseph Campbell, a mythologist who detailed this story structure in his work The Hero With a Thousand Faces. The Hero's Journey consists of several steps that a person must endure to achieve some goal.
The Hero's Journey is commonly found in coming-of-age novels, also known as bildungsromans, such as Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. In the bildungsroman, a young person must leave the familiarity of home to grow, mature, and ultimately see the returns on their efforts.
As a bildungsroman, Song of Solomon contains many elements of the Hero's Journey archetype. To see this, one can break down the Hero's Journey into its component parts and identify moments within the story in which the monomythic structure is evident.
1. The Ordinary World: Protagonist Milkman Dead lives an idle existence without much regard for the world around him, surrounded by several relatives: his father, his aunt Pilate, and best friend, Guitar Bains.
2. The Call to Adventure: Overwhelmed by the seriousness of several events that occur within a short span of time, Milkman makes the decision to travel.
3. Refusal of the Call: Milkman needs money to make his escape and, because of that, remains trapped in his hometown.
4. Meeting the Mentor: Though there is no traditional mentor figure, both Milkman's father and aunt, Macon and Pilate, serve as mentor figures.
5. Crossing the Threshold: Milkman begins a search for rumored gold in earnest, first looking in his aunt Pilate's house and then in the cave where the gold was originally supposed to be located.
6. Tests, Allies, Enemies: Milkman is unable to find the gold. Meanwhile, his alliance with his best friend, Guitar, crumbles, and he makes new alliances with characters such as ex-servant Circe.
7. Approach to the Inmost Cave: Milkman spends time with other black community members and learns more about his people.
8. Ordeal: While hunting, Guitar attempts to kill Milkman, but Milkman is saved by his new allies.
9. Reward: Milkman learns from Susan the true story of his family's ancestry. He also comes to realize that the "Song of Solomon" he hears is about his family.
10. The Road Back: Milkman returns to Michigan and his aunt Pilate.
11. Resurrection: Milkman finds that Hagar, his former lover, sank into a depression and died while he was gone.
12. Return With the Elixir: Milkman relates the information he has learned to his family.
In Song of Solomon, the ending does deviate from the traditional Hero's Journey because of the lack of real resolution, with Milkman engaged in conflict with Guitar and his aunt Pilate's death. However, the rest of the structure quite clearly follows the monomyth, and so the story can be said to have a monomythic structure.
http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/Workshop-stuff/Joseph-Campbell-Hero-Journey.htm
According to Joseph Campbell, the hero's journey consists of the following steps:
1. The Ordinary World
2. The Call to Adventure
3. Refusal of the Quest
4. Accepting the Call
5. Entering the Unknown
6. Tests and the Supreme Ordeal
7. Reward and Journey Home
8. Restoring the World
In Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Milkman must take up a quest that eventually leads him to self-knowledge and a wider understanding and appreciation for his heritage and his family.
Early in the novel, Milkman (Macon Jr.) Dead has a somewhat strained relationship with his family. His name is a nickname for his attachment to his mother (he nursed until he was much older than the age most children stop nursing), and his father expects him to carry on his business even though Milkman is not particularly inspired by that line of work. In the first chapters of the novel, we see Milkman as a character who is not quite at home with himself. He has a hard time making sense of his connections to his immediate family, and he dislikes being forbidden to mingle with his father's sister, Pilate, and her family. He eventually rebels and starts a relationship with his cousin Hagar and begins spending more time at Pilate's house. Milkman is a character in what Campbell calls "The Ordinary World," but he must go on an extraordinary journey over the course of the novel.
Milkman embarks upon a quest to find gold, but what he ends up finding is much more valuable. It allows him to reconcile the tension within himself and between himself and his family. In Virginia, Milkman meets people who know his ancestry. He learns about his forefathers and foremothers, and he even learns the "Song of Solomon." He also taps into his great-grandfather's supernatural power: the power of flight. In the first chapter of the novel, we learn that a man trying to fly from the hospital building falls to his death on the same day Milkman is born. This revelation about Milkman's inner strength and ability brings the novel full circle. Learning about his heritage allows him to "Restore the World" and reconcile the parts of himself that were unstable or unknowable earlier in the book. As such, Milkman does go through a typical hero's journey in Song of Solomon.
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