What Is Haroun Hero's Journey
Haroun’s Heroic Feat
A tale of adventure can pertain to an individual’s journey, whether it is a story in which the character physically journeys from one place to another, or a story encompassing a journey within the character. Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and The Sea of Stories takes readers on a journey of their own as they experience the enchanting tale of a young boy, Haroun, and his heroic journey from one realm to another. In a way, this story amounts to the structure of the standard hero’s journey, however revising the structured way the series of events unfolds. Characteristic of a hero’s myth, Haroun is an ordinary young boy at the beginning of the novel. His father tells stories, yet never comes forth with a legitimate explanation of their creation. As it turns out, the stories that Haroun’s father has told are in fact magically gathered from a different world than is known to ordinary man. Haroun encounters the magical water genie that provides his father with his flow of stories. This water genie notes the beginning of a profound journey between different …show more content…
In Rushdie’s work, Haroun embodies this heroic character, when he realizes he is at fault for his father’s inability to continue with story telling. When he encounters the water genie, the genie becomes his mentor in a sense—bringing him from the ordinary world to his magical world of stories, where Haroun will be able to save his father’s stories. The reader becomes increasingly aware of Haroun’s motive and drive when he drinks a certain wishwater and sees his father’s face in his mind: “just do this one thing for me, my boy, just this one little thing” (Rushdie, 70). With this motivation, Haroun proclaims himself a hero for a cause—his father. However, as the story progresses, he becomes all the more heroic as the story land is faced with problems of its own and Haroun steps in to
A tale of adventure can pertain to an individual’s journey, whether it is a story in which the character physically journeys from one place to another, or a story encompassing a journey within the character. Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and The Sea of Stories takes readers on a journey of their own as they experience the enchanting tale of a young boy, Haroun, and his heroic journey from one realm to another. In a way, this story amounts to the structure of the standard hero’s journey, however revising the structured way the series of events unfolds. Characteristic of a hero’s myth, Haroun is an ordinary young boy at the beginning of the novel. His father tells stories, yet never comes forth with a legitimate explanation of their creation. As it turns out, the stories that Haroun’s father has told are in fact magically gathered from a different world than is known to ordinary man. Haroun encounters the magical water genie that provides his father with his flow of stories. This water genie notes the beginning of a profound journey between different …show more content…
In Rushdie’s work, Haroun embodies this heroic character, when he realizes he is at fault for his father’s inability to continue with story telling. When he encounters the water genie, the genie becomes his mentor in a sense—bringing him from the ordinary world to his magical world of stories, where Haroun will be able to save his father’s stories. The reader becomes increasingly aware of Haroun’s motive and drive when he drinks a certain wishwater and sees his father’s face in his mind: “just do this one thing for me, my boy, just this one little thing” (Rushdie, 70). With this motivation, Haroun proclaims himself a hero for a cause—his father. However, as the story progresses, he becomes all the more heroic as the story land is faced with problems of its own and Haroun steps in to