The Hero's Journey

The Hero's Journey

Through out this term we have been studying the hero’s journey. You may be asking what the hero’s journey has to do with the topic of gender representations that I am going to talk to you about today. The hero’s journey is about a hero who embarks on a journey to fulfill some sort of quest. In ‘The Messenger’ the hero, Ed Kennedy undertakes a quest of triumph and self discovery. While Ed is on his journey there are many values, attitudes, beliefs and gender representations that are explicitly promoted in the text which as the reader we are positioned to believe. Some of these include the marginalization of women, men being portrayed as dominant and over ruling, man at work and woman at home stereotype and also the happy family life are all represented.

The gender representations through out the novel are divided male and female. Women are portrayed as home makers, single dependent mothers, helpless in love and incompetent if they do not have a male figure in their life. These representations give power to the male characters and convince the reader that the men in the novel are superior to the women. Markus Zusak has constructed the reader’s worldview to coincide with the way the female characters are represented in the novel. The characteristics in the novel are indistinguishable with the worldview of women in today’s society. The representations of women are endorsed by the author and are dominant in the text as suggested by this quote ‘my first stop is Edgar Street, where the lights are on and I can see the mother and her daughter eating. It strikes me that without the man there they might not have enough money coming in to pay the bills’. (Zusak 2002, p170).



Having a mother and father living together at home with happy children in harmony together is a representation that is endorsed by the author’s interaction and manipulation of certain values, attitudes and beliefs. Readers are encouraged to align themselves to accept this representation as it...

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