Perhaps after reading all the adventure stories of heroes around the world, you soon discover the similarities between each different stories.--Yes indeed there are some similarities between them, and American mythologist Joseph Campbell generalized the collective components in all heroes' adventures into his famous book:
The Hero With A Thousand Faces and named it " The adventure of a hero". He’s not the first person that brought up the idea, though. In fact, Vladimir Propp had induced similar ideas in the book
Morphology of the Folk Tale (published in 1928).
Anyway, in his book, Campbell sorted the phases of a hero's adventure into three main gradations:
departure, initiation and return. This is how he introduced the monomyth (the basic structures shared in adventure stories from all over the world) in his book: " A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won. The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man."
In the following, I'd like to use one of my favorite novels-- The Percy Jackson and the Olympians series as an example and summarily apply it to the three main gradations (departure, initiation and return) of a hero's journey.
I. Departure
Growing up in a step family, Percy Jackson, real name Perseus Jackson, was found out to be a demigod at the age of twelve. It was also in that year when Percy first discovered who his real father is – Poseidon, god of the sea, earthshaker, strombringer and father of horses. The moment Percy crossed the threshold of Camp Half-Blood (a camp for demigods like Percy), he also set his foot in a world he used to call it "…myths, to explain lightning and the seasons and stuff. They’re what people believed before there was science.” And this is the beginning of his adventure.
II. Initiation
Book one--Accused of stealing the lightning bolt, Percy was compelled to take up a quest in order to ferret out the bolt and the real thief. Though Percy thought finding Zeus’s master bolt was the main purpose of this quest, he didn’t realize that the most important part of this quest was the conversion of his relationship with his father and his interpretation of a " friend".
Book three--With his friend Annabeth lost, Percy secretly followed Zoe, Bianca, Thalia and Grover to their quest searching the goddess Artemis, hoping to find Annabeth. He confronted a lot of dangerous monsters and situations. He had close calls coming up against the manticore(Dr.Thorn), the Nemean Lion(only beaten by Hercules before), the skeleton worriors(grown from the rannosaurs’ teeth),the Erymanthian Boar, the Talos(in the junkyard of the gods), Ladon the dragon(guarding the garden of twilight and the apples of immortality) and the cutest but also the most dangerous—Bessie, the Ophiotaurus.
In conclusion, all the trials Percy faced are defined as the phase of initiation according to the notion "The adventure of a hero".
III. Return
Giving up immortality meant saying goodbye to the dignity as a hero and becoming a regular guy in the ordinary mortal world. Percy Jackson once again crossed the threshold between the two worlds. Not with a hero’s pride, though, he brought hope into the world. For, “They (all demigods) won’t be left out in the world on their own at the mercy of monsters… No unclaimed demigods will be crammed into the Hermes cabin anymore, wondering who their parents are… All children of the gods will be welcome and treated with respect.”
And of course, Percy could live a "normal" life ever after. “For once, I didn’t look back.”
Last, what I have to say about all these.....
Heroes are the masters of two worlds. They brought the views of another world into this world. Just as what Jackson did, he brought the Olympians the sufferings of the mortal world. And he delivered the half-bloods from their miseries at a price of the chance of immortality. This, as once his father Poseidon had said:
“Anyone else must choose to take the burden of their own free will. Only a hero, someone with strength, a true heart and great courage, would do such a thing.”
According to Greek mythology, before anything in this world appeared, there existed only "chaos". The word "chaos" was derived from the ancient Greek word "khaos". It is a neutral word and it's the name of the first god of the world---Chaos. Unlike all other masculine gods and feminine goddesses, Chaos doesn't have a specific gender. Chaos is the great void of nothingness as well as the primary source of everything. Chaos then gave birth without a mate to Gaia, the Earth Goddess, Erebos, the god that stands for Darkness and Nux, the goddess of Night. Perhaps all the statements above sounds quite unreasonable and weird to most of us. Yet it reflects the way how the Greek view the origin of the world. The earth, the darkness and the night all came into the world after chaos.