Your essays for The Hero With a Thousand Faces are, for the most part, pretty good. But there's a difference between what's pretty good and what's great, and great is what I want you striving for. A couple of you have turned in truly great essays, and I am posting them below with the writers' permission for you to look, learn from, and model your work after.
The
Face of Death, the Voice of Redemption
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini is a
moving recollection of the life of two Afghan boys whose lives are torn apart
by hatred, racism and betrayal. Afghanistan is shown for the beautiful land it
is, a home for the two friends, Hassan, and Amir, and their families. Their
friendship is torn apart when Amir seeks his father’s approval and at the same
time leaves Hassan to the abuses of a psychopath, Assef. Amir can’t bear to
live with Hassan after this, and he sets up an incident that forces Hassan and
his family away from his home. The Soviet takeover in Afghanistan forces Amir
and his father Baba to flee to America. Decades later, after the beginning of
the Taliban Regime, Amir returns to Afghanistan seeking to come to terms with
the demons of his past life.
Our
guide to the story Joseph Campbell speaks first of initiation, the acceptance
of the path set out before the hero, saying, “A blunder—apparently the merest
chance—reveals an unsuspected world, and the individual is drawn into a
relationship with forces that are not rightly understood” (Campbell 42). He
goes on, “As a preliminary manifestation of the powers that are breaking into
play…coming up as it were by miracle, can be termed the herald…the call to
adventure” (Campbell 42). In the case of the Kite runner the call comes from an
old friend of Amir’s, Rahim Kahn. The power of the call, the one that gives it
a heroic quality, originates in Rahim’s words moments before hanging up, “Come. There is a way to be good again”
(Hosseini 192).
The
description of the heroic call is a remarkable one indeed,
…“the call to adventure”—signifies
that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of
gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. This fateful region
of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a
forest…but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings,
unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds and impossible delight (Campbell 48).
Amir’s call to heroism fits this
description perfectly. He has a treasure in Afghanistan that is immensely
powerful, that means more to him than anything. This is described to a boy he
finds there, Sohrab, a son of his friend Hassan who says,
“I want my old life back.” I [Amir]
didn’t know what to say where to look, so I gazed down at my hands. Your old life, I thought. My old life too. I played in the same yard,
Sohrab. I lived in the same house. But the grass is dead and a stranger’s jeep
is parked in the driveway of our house, pissing oil all over the asphalt. Our
old life is gone, Sohrab, and everyone in it is either dead or dying. It’s just
you and me now. Just you and me (Hosseini 354-355).
This describes the call to heroism
perfectly; it talks of a place of glorious treasure, of unrecalled bliss. And
now, it is a place of terrible torment, of the horror of the Taliban, and the
desire for death as an escape from the dismal reality of Afghanistan. This is
the call the readers watch Amir answer, the call to bring a splash of green to
a dull shell shocked landscape.
But
the answer to the call is at first shown in another light, when, “…we encounter
the dull case of the call unanswered; for it is always possible to turn the ear
to other interests” (Campbell 49). And Amir very nearly does that, for a second
time. The first case is when he buries his past, never to tell another soul for
decades, not his father, not his wife, not his most trusted friends. However,
“…as we have seen: ‘Well able is Allah to save.’” (Campbell 61). Amir’s first
savior comes in Rahim Kahn, a man who knows Amir’s dark secret, his betrayal of
his dear friend Hassan. He can help Amir take up a burden that Amir can no
longer carry himself. He can be, “…the great figure of the guide, the teacher…”
(Campbell 60). Rahim can bring Amir’s past to light, he can show Amir the way
to right his past wrongs, and draw him back to the realm of his childhood. All
the same, Amir still nearly leaves Afghanistan, assured by himself, “I can’t go to Kabul, I had said to Rahim
Khan. I have a wife in America, a home, a
career, and a family” (Hosseini 226). But this time, Amir knows, he cannot
go home to America, not without the son of his best friend, not with redemption
so close at hand. And he tells us as much moments later, “…how could I pack up
and go back home when my actions may have cost Hassan a chance at those very
same things?” (Hosseini 226).
Answering
the call opens the hero up to a new world, one where his life is transformed on
a grand scale. Amir learns that he will find redemption only after sacrifice
and death to self. In a certain sense, Amir goes back to Afghanistan to die, to
subject his rationality to the monsters of the subconscious, where it will
certainly meet its end. Campbell discusses this in terms of guardians of the
mind. “…the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the ‘threshold
guardian’ at the entrance to the zone of magnified power” (Campbell 64). This
is the rationality of the hero, as he crosses the boundary from conscious to
subconscious, from his own will, to the will of another, from the US to
Afghanistan, his mind tries to stop him, telling him to think it through, or
simply refuse the choice of descent. “These are the threshold guardians to ward
away all incapable of encountering the higher silence within” (Campbell 77).
These are the guardians Amir faced when he agreed to go to Kabul. These are the
guardians he convinced to allow him to pass when he stays at the soccer stadium
to meet an executioner. Now, he enters the arena of the hero.
Campbell
starts a discussion of the hero’s conflict by using the battle between Prince
Five-weapons, and an ogre with sticky hair. This ogre has the young prince
trapped, and totally outmatched, and yet the prince is not afraid, as he tells
us, “…‘why should I be afraid? For in one life one death is absolutely
certain’” (Campbell 72). Amir says something rather similar when he faces his
ogre, Assef, the same man who split up Hassan and Amir. “I don’t know what emboldened
me to be so curt, maybe the fact that I thought I was going to die anyway”
(Hosseini 285) Campbell continues,
As a symbol of the world to which
the fives senses glue us, and which cannot be pressed aside by the actions of
the physical organs, Sticky-hair was subdued only when the Future Buddha, no
longer protected by the five weapons of his momentary name and physical
character, resorted to the unnamed, invisible sixth: the divine thunderbolt of
the knowledge of the transcendent principle….Therewith the situation changed.
He was no longer caught, but released; for that which he now remembered himself
to be is ever free…and he was rendered self denying (Campbell 73).
Fear which had up till now
dominated Amir is unable to hold any power over him. Thus he can feel, “Healed
at last. I laughed” (Hosseini 289). Fear did not conquer him, so neither can
Assef break him with his brass knuckles. Just as the weapons of the prince were
a trap of the senses, so was Amir trapped by his past. But now he is, just like
the prince, freed from his past as he says, “…in some hidden nook in a corner
of my mind, I’d been looking forward to this” (Hosseini 289). His subconscious
condoned something his conscious never would, and by giving in, by entering the
realm where both sides had a voice, Amir could at last sever himself from the
chains of his past.
Amir
in this passage also learns to pass by, “‘The highest spirit of reason, who
bars the way until he has been overcome’” (Campbell 73). Until his fight with
Assef, he would have fled any danger, ruled by common sense. But now he
realizes what he must undergo to finally be free, and by, “Self-denying, he
became divine” (Campbell 73). He has found a way past, “…the clashing rocks
that crush the traveler, but between which the heroes always pass” (Campbell
73). Amir has been, “…swallowed into the unknown, and would have appeared to
have died” (Campbell 74). In this case, death is not just symbolic, but
literal, Amir had not only died to himself, to be reborn, but did in fact,
appear to have died.
Amir has now
undergone the trials he must endure to receive his redemption, and now he
recognizes, “...the life centering, life renewing act” (Campbell 77). He knows
he must take Sohrab back to America, but this will prove to be nearly as
challenging as his bargain with Assef.
The reason for
this difficulty is Sohrab, after all his difficulties, his sorrows, threats,
trials, and the like, has finally closed the door on life. At first he tries to
do this violently, with a hotel razor blade. Then, when he is saved against his
will, he becomes silent. Campbell, somewhat surprisingly has words on this
subject as well, saying
Willed introversion, in fact is one
of the classic implements of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate
device. It drives the psychic energies into depth and activates the lost
continent of unconscious infantile and archetypal images…It cannot be
described, quite, as an answer to any specific call. Rather, it is a
deliberate, terrific refusal to respond to anything but the deepest, highest,
richest answer to the as-yet-unknown demand of some waiting void within: a kind
of total strike, or rejection of the offered terms of life, as a result of
which some power of transformation carries the problem to a place of new
magnitudes, where it is suddenly and finally resolved (Campbell 53-54).
Sohrab, as we have already seen,
desperately wants to return to his old life, and sees this as a means to that
end. He also uses it to show his foster parents that he will not respond to
anything except the deepest and most powerful recollection of his old life.
This is something Amir and his wife do not realize, until Amir sees a kite go
up once more into the sky. He recalls the long hours he and Hassan had spent on
kite fighting and running, their greatest passion, and at the same time, the
thing that would drive them apart. He recalls, “The last time I had felt a rush
like this was that day in the winter of 1975, just after I had cut the last
kite when I spotted Baba on our rooftop, clapping, beaming” (Hosseini 370).
Amir hands Sohrab the spool of string, and a kite, and suddenly, “The glassy,
vacant look in his eyes was gone” (Hosseini 369). A kite falls and Amir turns
and asks, “‘Do you want me to run that kite for you?’…I thought I saw him nod.
‘For you, a thousand times over,’ I heard myself say. Then I turned and ran.”
In the words of Hassan, Amir now brings new life to Hassan’s son, and completes
the cycle of redemption.
2/27/13
Two Calls
to Heroism
The
first chapter of Joseph Campbell’s book, The
Hero with a Thousand Faces, is aptly titled Departure. It vividly describes
the process by which heroes embark on their journeys. Campbell explains, over
the course of several subchapters, how heroes are called to duty by a herald (someone
who summons the hero to adventure, usually with a crisis). Some heroes accept
the call unflinchingly, while others shy away in diffidence. In The Kite Runner, Amir, the protagonist,
faces several opportunities to be heroic. He is a unique hero because he acts
cowardly in some instances and heroically in others. The first chapter in
Campbell’s book helped me make sense of Amir’s seemingly erratic heroic
behavior. (Quite significantly, Campbell’s insight also made me realize that
Amir is a hero).
Towards
the beginning of The Kite Runner,
Amir faced his first call to heroism when he witnessed Assef raping Hassan in
the alley. In this instance, Amir refused the call to heroism by doing nothing.
Of course, Amir was only a child, but after reading Campbell’s first chapter,
it is clear that there is another reason for Amir’s failure to act heroically:
there was technically no herald—no one was there to direct Amir onto a path of
heroism. Amir was presented with a crisis, but only because he witnessed it
himself. Nobody asked Amir to step in and save Hassan. As a child, it is
difficult to expect that Amir would have taken heroic action without (or with,
for that matter) such provocation. Amir even said, “I ran because I was a
coward…I actually aspired to cowardice” (Hosseini, 77). (However, the underlying
reason for Amir’s cowardice, which I personally find to be more explanatory of
Amir’s failure to act, will be examined in depth later).
This
failure to answer the call of heroism shaped the rest of Amir’s life. Campbell
says “Refusal of the summons converts adventure into its negative” (Campbell,
49). Amir’s experience reflects those words. After refusing the call, Amir and Hassan’s relationship was
stifled in awkwardness. Amir responded in the worst way possible: by framing
Hassan of theft to remove Hassan from his life. This action is the opposite of
heroic.
His second major
call to heroism comes in the form of a literal call from Rahim Khan, who, in
this role, is the epitome of a herald. This is the beginning of Amir’s journey,
what Campbell termed “the call to adventure” (Campbell, 42). When Amir truly enters
the hero cycle, however, is when he, after initially refusing, accepts Rahim
Khan’s final wish for him to find Sohrab. Embarking on this journey certainly
entails danger, and Amir knows it. He has some interpersonal dialogue
reflecting upon Rahim Khan’s request, as well as the revelation that he and
Hassan are brothers.
I wished Rahim Khan hadn’t called me.
I wished he had let me live one in my oblivion. But he had called me. And what
Rahim Khan revealed to me changed things. Made me see how my entire life…had
been a cycle of lies, betrayals, and secrets…On the rickshaw ride back to Rahim
Khan’s apartment, I remembered Baba saying that my problem was that someone had
always done my fighting for me. I was thirty-eight now. My hair was receding
and streaked with gray, and lately I’d traced little crow’s-feet etched around
the corners of my eyes. I was older now, but maybe not yet too old to do my own
fighting (Hosseini, 226).
This
soliloquy comes after Amir initially refused Rahim Khan’s request, and right
after he has this inner dialogue, he decides to accept the mission of finding
Sohrab. Campbell says, “Not all who hesitate are lost…so it is that sometimes
the predicament following an obstinate refusal of the call proves to be the
occasion of a providential revelation of some unsuspected principle of release”
(Campbell, 53). Amir has his revelation that he needs to venture on this quest
in his soliloquy above. But, Campbell’s first chapter made me realize that what
truly lies at the root of Amir’s revelation was his original refusal to answer
the call when he did not stand up for Hassan.
Synthesizing what
I have learned about fate, the hero, and what I have learned from this chapter
in Campbell’s book, I find this argument to be very compelling: Amir was
destined to refuse his first call to heroism so that he could answer the
second—and more important—call to save Sohrab. The reason that Amir was fated
to refuse the first call was because he perceived himself as a coward. This was
Baba’s doing.
Campbell has some
relevant ideas here. He says, “One is bound by the walls of childhood; the father
and mother stand as threshold guardians, and the timorous soul, fearful of some
punishment, fails to make the passage through the door and come to birth in the
world without” (Campbell, 52). This is exactly what cripples Amir; he was so
afraid of saving Hassan because if he had brought that situation to light,
Baba’s admiration for his kite fighting victory would have been very short
lived. Amir says, “Maybe Hassan was the price I had to pay…to win Baba”
(Hosseini, 77). It is the fear of dampening this praise from Baba that keeps
Amir from saving Hassan. Of course, Baba is also the one who perpetuates Amir’s
notion that he is a coward. Although Amir and Baba’s relationship improves
drastically upon their move to America, it was Baba’s influence on the early
years in Amir’s life in Afghanistan that kept him from interfering with Assef
raping Hassan.
After answering
the second call to heroism and before achieving success, Amir was forced to
fight Assef. This is a fight that parallels the fight between Peekay and the
Judge in The Power of One on almost
every level. Most importantly, these two fights are between heroes who have
embarked on a journey to conquer childhood tormentors. Although I would
categorize this action at the end of the hero cycle, Campbell’s chapter about
departure is not entirely irrelevant. Campbell tells the story of Prince
Five-Weapons, who fights a nearly insuperable foe, yet he fights without fear.
Amir and Peekay both fight their adversaries unreservedly—without fear. In
Amir’s case, he would have died had it not been for Sohrab’s help, but he was
willing to die. It is this fearlessness that makes a hero.
Does
facing two calls to heroism but only responding to one make Amir a hero or a
coward? After reading Campbell’s first chapter, I can conclude that Amir is
certainly a hero. Failing one out of two calls to be a hero is not like a student failing one out of two tests.
Amir answering the second call was dependent upon his failure to answer the
first. By answering the second call, accepting danger, and facing his worst
fears, Amir proved himself a hero.
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