Hero’s Journey as a Lattice Structure: A Case Study of Star Wars

Abstract

Storytelling is one of the oldest human activities for sharing information, entertainment, etc., and it is not wrong to say that myths were the most common form of storytelling through all ages in all cultures. Thanks to the researchers starting with Adolf Bastian and followed by Carl Gustav Jung and Joseph Campbell we now know that there is a common structure in myths regardless the cultural environment they are told in. Among the monomyths of Jung maybe the most interesting one is the hero and, as Campbell showed in “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, his journey. Crucially, the hero’s journey is not only a spatial journey but also a temporal one. The aim of this paper is to show that the temporal journey of the hero in the film series Star Wars, Episode IV-VI, can be organized into a fractal-lattice structure. The lattice-based framework presented here can serve as a formal foundation for an automated storytelling engine to be used in various areas like computer games, interactive books, e-learning, etc.

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