archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Authored taxonomy · an archetype

Hero (Vogler)

The one the story follows, and the one it changes.

Christopher Vogler’s first character archetype in The Writer’s Journey (1992): the dramatic function of the protagonist, the character the audience travels with and who changes. A screenwriting role glossed through Freud’s ego and reached through Campbell, not Jung’s hero.

Vogler’s Hero is a job in a story, not a kind of person. It is the function carried by the protagonist: the character through whose eyes the audience enters the story, whose wants drive it, who is tested, who acts decisively at the climax, and who comes out the other end altered. Vogler treats the role as the centre around which every other function in his scheme is arranged; the Mentor, the Herald, the Threshold Guardian and the rest are defined by what they do to or for this character.

Go deeper

At the threshold

The shades of night were falling fast,As through an Alpine village passedA youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,A banner with the strange device,Excelsior!"Try not the Pass!" the old man said:"Dark lowers the tempest overhead,The roaring torrent is deep and wide!And loud that clarion voice replied,Excelsior!

Public domain · Longfellow, Excelsior (stanzas 1 and 4) (1841)

A youth with a banner passes through the village and will not be turned back by the old man’s warning, the protagonist set on a road before we know where it leads.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 6 figures as a list
  1. Jung’s example

    Luke Skywalker

    Vogler, “A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces” (memo, 1985), 1977

    The bored farm boy whose call, refusal and crossing are the memo’s running case.

  2. Jung’s example

    Dorothy Gale

    Vogler, “A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces” (memo, 1985), 1939

    Setting out on the Yellow Brick Road is the memo’s picture of a hero committing to the journey.

  3. Jung’s example

    Shane

    Vogler, The Writer’s Journey (2nd ed., 1998), “Hero”, 1953

    Vogler’s first instance of the loner hero, who rides in, settles things and cannot stay.

  4. Jung’s example

    Ethan Edwards

    Vogler, The Writer’s Journey (2nd ed., 1998), “Hero”, 1956

    John Wayne’s searcher, another of Vogler’s solitary Western heroes outside the group he serves.

  5. a later reading

    Katniss Everdeen

    The Hunger Games; read as Hero by Final Draft, 2008

    Volunteers in her sister’s place, so that the story’s first act is already a sacrifice.

  6. a later reading

    Walter White

    Breaking Bad; read as a tragic Hero by Schwartz, 2008

    A protagonist the audience follows into ruin, Vogler’s tragic variety carried to its end.

The wider sky

Where the Hero (Vogler) has been seen

20 exemplars across 9 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

In the fell clutch of circumstanceI have not winced nor cried aloud.Under the bludgeonings of chanceMy head is bloody, but unbowed.It matters not how strait the gate,How charged with punishments the scroll,I am the master of my fate:I am the captain of my soul.

Public domain · Henley, I. M. R. T. Hamilton Bruce (‘Invictus’), stanzas 2 and 4 (1888)

The bloodied self that insists it is captain of its soul is close to the ego that Vogler, after Freud, makes the Hero’s inner meaning, and shows what that insistence costs.

The camera stays with them when everyone else goes home.

They want one thing and are made to pay for another.

By the last reel something has been given up, and we feel what it cost.

The deep layer · what was written

Hero (Vogler): the entry

Definition

Vogler’s Hero is a job in a story, not a kind of person. It is the function carried by the protagonist: the character through whose eyes the audience enters the story, whose wants drive it, who is tested, who acts decisively at the climax, and who comes out the other end altered. Vogler treats the role as the centre around which every other function in his scheme is arranged; the Mentor, the Herald, the Threshold Guardian and the rest are defined by what they do to or for this character.

Two features set the definition apart. First, Vogler puts the Hero’s defining mark in a willingness to give something up, with the other heroic qualities secondary to it, so a flawed, reluctant or even unlikeable lead can fill the role. Second, the role is flexible: he describes willing and unwilling heroes, group-minded and solitary ones, anti-heroes, tragic heroes and “catalyst” heroes who change others while staying much the same themselves. This is a storyteller’s category for building a protagonist, and the entry records it as such. It is not Jung’s hero, which is a pattern of psychic energy, and the classical entry on the hero is about that other thing.

History

The Hero came first in Vogler’s work, before there was any list of archetypes. His studio memo, “A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, written in the mid-1980s while he was a story analyst at Walt Disney and dated 1985 on the copy he later posted, is a walk through Campbell’s adventure using recent films, with Luke Skywalker as the running case. The memo names “the young hero” among the recurring figures of myth that it calls identical with Jung’s archetypes, but it has no separate account of character functions. Vogler’s own retrospective says the archetype material was added later, when the memo became a handout for his teaching at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and grew into a book.

The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters (Michael Wiese Productions, 1992) set out the archetypes in a chapter of their own, ahead of the twelve stages. The second edition (1998), retitled Mythic Structure for Writers, is the earliest text checked for this entry. There the Hero opens Book One’s chapter on the archetypes (pp. 35–46) and is given, like each figure after it, a psychological function and a set of dramatic functions. The psychological gloss is Freud’s, not Jung’s:

In psychological terms, the archetype of the Hero represents what Freud called the ego — that part of the personality that separates from the mother, that considers itself distinct from the rest of the human race. — Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey (2nd ed., 1998), “Hero”, pp. 35–46

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The dramatic functions are the working part. The first is audience identification, the Hero as the viewer’s way into the story; and among the qualities Vogler weighs, sacrifice is the one he calls the true mark of the figure. The chapter then sorts heroes into varieties, from willing and unwilling to the loner Western hero, for which Vogler’s examples are Shane, Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, John Wayne’s Ethan in The Searchers and the Lone Ranger. The third edition (2007) and the 25th-anniversary edition (2020) keep the figure; no renaming is recorded.

Where Vogler says he drew the figure from is clear: Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), whose hero is the subject of every stage, and behind Campbell the claim that myth’s figures are Jung’s archetypes. The claim holds for the lineage of the word, which does run from Jung’s 1912 hero through Campbell to Vogler. It does not hold for the concept. Vogler’s Hero is defined by its use in a screenplay, and its psychological gloss is borrowed from Freud.

The debate

Against the classical ten the relation is one of name only. Jung’s hero (1912, rewritten 1952) is the image of consciousness fighting its way out of the unconscious, an energy that can appear in any figure of a dream. Campbell’s hero is the subject of a single mythic sequence. Vogler’s is the protagonist of a commercial film. Each step keeps the word and changes the object, which is why the site keeps three separate places for them: the hero entry for Jung, the Campbell framework row for the monomyth, and this entry for the screenwriting role.

The criticism of Vogler’s scheme bears on the Hero first, since every other function is defined against it. Vogler himself opened the preface of his second edition by answering it:

First, I must address a significant objection about the whole idea of The Writer’s Journey— the suspicion of artists and critics that it is formulaic, leading to stale repetition. — Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey (2nd ed., 1998), preface

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

His answer was that the pattern should be used as a form and not a formula, and in the same preface he worried that standardised story methods might flatten local differences across world cinema. David Bordwell, in The Way Hollywood Tells It (2006, p. 34), called Vogler the most successful promoter of the mythic-journey template in Hollywood and described his character archetypes as derived from Campbell, Jung and Vogler’s own imagination, while judging the template less influential than the three-act pattern. Harry Kirchner (2009), reviewing Steven Maras’s history of screenwriting, noted that the book rests on a Jungian paradigm reached through “pop anthropologist” Campbell. Helen Jacey (2010) asked how far Vogler’s paradigm carries a masculine bias, writing a screenplay with two female protagonists against Vogler’s model and Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey (1990). Maras (2017) argued more generally that universal claims about story form in screenwriting criticism hide real cultural differences in how stories are built; Vogler’s Hero, offered as a pattern found everywhere, is one of the claims that argument touches.

Empirical status

None. Vogler’s Hero is a craft category and has not been tested as a psychological construct. The nearest research is Rogers and colleagues (2023), who found that seeing one’s own life story in terms of a seven-element reduction of Campbell’s sequence increased reported meaning in life. That study tests a way of framing a life, not Vogler’s account of a dramatic function.

Appearances

The Hero is the one function every application of Vogler’s book names. Stuart Voytilla’s Myth and the Movies (1999), with a foreword by Vogler, reads fifty films through his scheme, pairing Curtin as Hero against Dobbs as Shadow in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and John McClane against Hans Gruber in Die Hard. Connie Neal (2007) built a book on good and evil in Harry Potter, Narnia and Star Wars on Vogler’s framework. Julian Woolford (2012) applies the stages and functions to the book musical, following Jean Valjean through Les Misérables. Kendra Levin (2016) turns the eight archetypes on the working writer, who is cast as the Hero of their own creative life. In film-industry writing the role is now a stock term; Final Draft’s guide to the archetypes (2024) offers Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones and Katniss Everdeen. Each of these is a reading through Vogler’s scheme, not a statement by the films’ makers.

Sources

  • Vogler, C. (1985). A practical guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces (studio memo, Walt Disney). Text and Vogler’s account of its writing as posted on thewritersjourney.com, archived 14 December 2017: http://web.archive.org/web/20171214034841/http://www.thewritersjourney.com/hero%27s_journey.htm
  • Vogler, C. (1992). The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters. Michael Wiese Productions. ISBN 978-0-941188-13-5.
  • Vogler, C. (1998). The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (2nd ed.). Michael Wiese Productions. ISBN 978-0-941188-70-8. Preface; Book One, “The Archetypes”, “Hero”, pp. 35–46. Read via the Internet Archive full-text search: https://archive.org/details/writersjourneymy00vogl
  • Vogler, C. (2007). The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (3rd ed.). Michael Wiese Productions. ISBN 978-1-932907-36-0.
  • Vogler, C. (2020). The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (25th-anniversary ed.). Michael Wiese Productions. ISBN 978-1-61593-315-0.
  • Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton University Press edition, 1968. ISBN 978-0-691-01784-6.
  • Bordwell, D. (2006). The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-24622-5. P. 34.
  • Kirchner, H. (2009). Review of S. Maras, Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice. Screening the Past, 26. https://www.screeningthepast.com/issue-26-reviews/screenwriting-history-theory-and-practice/
  • Jacey, H. (2010). The hero and heroine’s journey and the writing of Loy. Journal of Screenwriting, 1(2), 309–323. https://doi.org/10.1386/josc.1.2.309/1
  • Maras, S. (2017). Towards a critique of universalism in screenwriting criticism. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(2), 177–196. https://doi.org/10.1386/josc.8.2.177_1
  • Murdock, M. (1990). The Heroine’s Journey. Shambhala. ISBN 978-0-87773-485-7.
  • Rogers, B. A., et al. (2023). Seeing your life story as a Hero’s Journey increases meaning in life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000341
  • Voytilla, S. (1999). Myth and the Movies: Discovering the Mythic Structure of 50 Unforgettable Films. Michael Wiese Productions. ISBN 978-0-941188-66-1.
  • Neal, C. (2007). Wizards, Wardrobes and Wookiees: Navigating Good and Evil in Harry Potter, Narnia and Star Wars. IVP Books. ISBN 978-0-8308-3366-5.
  • Woolford, J. (2012). How Musicals Work: And How to Write Your Own. Nick Hern Books. ISBN 978-1-84842-175-2.
  • Levin, K. (2016). The Hero Is You: Sharpen Your Focus, Conquer Your Demons, and Become the Writer You Were Born to Be. Conari Press. ISBN 978-1-57324-688-0.
  • Miyamoto, K. (2024, 24 April). Breaking down the character archetypes of the hero’s journey. Final Draft blog. https://www.finaldraft.com/blog/breaking-down-the-character-archetypes-of-the-heros-journey

Leaving

Not hear? when noise was everywhere! it tolledIncreasing like a bell. Names in my ears,Of all the lost adventurers my peers,--How such a one was strong, and such was bold,And such was fortunate, yet each of oldLost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, metTo view the last of me, a living frameFor one more picture! in a sheet of flameI saw them and I knew them all. And yetDauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,And blew. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."

Public domain · Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”, stanzas XXXIII–XXXIV (1855)

Watched by every adventurer who failed before him, the knight sounds his horn at the tower anyway: the last test met, with the outcome left beyond the frame.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey⚔ HeroConsciousness, fighting its way out of the dark.Return to the void