The Hero’s Journey: From Finnegans Wake to Star Wars — and Why Brands Keep Using It

I had already written “The Hero’s Journey” into my content plan before I properly understood what it was.

I knew the broad idea. A character begins in an ordinary world, receives some kind of call, leaves what is familiar, faces trials, changes, and returns.

I knew Star Wars was connected to it.

I knew marketers liked talking about it.

And I knew Joseph Campbell’s name belonged somewhere in the middle.

That was about the extent of it.

Then, in September 2026, I heard Jimmy Carr talking to Trevor Noah and disappeared into a rabbit hole.

Carr’s argument was wonderfully provocative: Star Wars, he suggested, is essentially the accessible version of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, with Joseph Campbell acting as the bridge between them.

I had already wanted to understand the Hero’s Journey.

Now I had apparently been told that the route there went through one of the most notoriously difficult books ever written.

So I started listening to Finnegans Wake as an audiobook.

This may have been my first mistake.

Part I · Separation

Finnegans Wake Is Not the Origin of the Hero’s Journey

This is where the story needs its first correction.

Carr describes Campbell as having done a dissertation on Finnegans Wake, then developing that work into The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

That is a brilliant conversational shortcut.

It is not quite the academic history.

Campbell earned a master’s degree in medieval literature at Columbia, then studied in Europe. He later abandoned plans for a doctorate when the interdisciplinary work he wanted to pursue did not fit comfortably within Columbia’s requirements.

He therefore did not complete a doctoral dissertation on Joyce.

But the Joyce connection is real — and arguably more interesting than the simplified version.

In 1944, Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson published A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, one of the earliest substantial guides to Joyce’s 1939 book.

Five years later, Campbell published his first major original work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

So Finnegans Wake was not Campbell’s thesis and Campbell did not simply convert Joyce’s novel into the Hero’s Journey.

But Joyce mattered enormously to him.

And there is one particularly beautiful connection.

The term “monomyth” — Campbell’s name for the recurring pattern he identified in heroic myths — came from Joyce.

The Joseph Campbell Foundation notes that Campbell borrowed the word from Finnegans Wake, where Joyce used it only once.

So Jimmy Carr’s chain is not wrong so much as compressed.

The real chain looks more like this:

Why Finnegans Wake Belongs in the Story Anyway

Finnegans Wake is difficult partly because Joyce seems determined to make language itself unstable.

Words blend into other words. Languages overlap. Puns multiply. History, religion, politics, dreams and mythology collapse into one another. The book is famously circular: its ending runs back into its beginning.

There is something wonderfully appropriate about finding the Hero’s Journey inside a book that refuses to travel in a straight line.

The Hero’s Journey, after all, is also circular.

The hero does not simply go somewhere.

The hero leaves, changes, and returns.

The destination is often home — but home experienced by somebody who is no longer the same person who left it.

Joyce’s influence on Campbell was therefore not a random literary detour. Campbell spent decades returning to Joyce because he saw modern literature doing something myths had always done: taking the chaos of human experience and giving it symbolic shape.

Before Campbell, There Were Thousands of Heroes

The Hero’s Journey is sometimes presented online as though Joseph Campbell invented a storytelling formula in 1949.

He did not.

Campbell’s claim was that recurring structures already existed across myths and stories from many different cultures.

His work drew on comparative mythology, religion, psychology and literature. Greek mythology is a particularly easy doorway because so many of its stories still sit close to Western popular culture.

Take Theseus.

He leaves the familiar world, travels to Crete, receives aid from Ariadne, enters the labyrinth, confronts the Minotaur and returns.

Or Perseus, who receives supernatural assistance before confronting Medusa and returns with the object of the quest.

Or Odysseus, whose long return from Troy is packed with thresholds, helpers, temptations, monsters, losses and transformations.

Not one of these stories fits a modern 12-stage diagram perfectly.

That is important.

Campbell was not saying Homer had accidentally written a screenplay template.

He was asking why certain movements keep appearing:

departure, ordeal, transformation, return.

And Greek mythology is only one strand.

The Epic of Gilgamesh predates the classical Greek tradition by centuries. Gilgamesh experiences friendship, loss, terror at mortality, a quest for something beyond ordinary human limits, failure and a return home with altered understanding.

Campbell also worked across Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Native American, Arthurian and many other traditions.

That breadth was the source of his appeal.

It would later become one of the main sources of criticism too.

Part II · Initiation

What Campbell Actually Meant by the Hero’s Journey

The version most people encounter online is a neat circle containing twelve stages.

That is not Campbell’s original model.

The Joseph Campbell Foundation describes the essential structure much more simply:

Campbell explored many recurring motifs inside those three movements.

In the departure section there might be a Call to Adventure, a Refusal of the Call, Supernatural Aid, a threshold and the famous “Belly of the Whale”.

Initiation could contain the Road of Trials, encounters with divine or symbolic figures, atonement, apotheosis and the Ultimate Boon.

Return might involve a refusal to come back, a Magic Flight, Rescue from Without, the crossing of another threshold, becoming Master of Two Worlds and ultimately achieving the Freedom to Live.

Some of Campbell’s language is very obviously of its period. “Woman as Temptress” is not exactly a phrase most modern story departments would rush to put on a PowerPoint slide.

More importantly, Campbell did not require every story to contain every motif in the same order.

The Foundation itself now makes the point bluntly: the monomyth is not fundamentally a plot blueprint.

It is a description of transformation.

The Hero Leaves Because Staying the Same Is No Longer Possible

This is the part of the model I find most useful.

A Hero’s Journey is not really about travelling.

It is about becoming.

Luke Skywalker travels across a galaxy, but the meaningful distance is between the person staring at the twin suns on Tatooine and the person capable of returning with a different understanding of himself and the world.

Theseus goes into a labyrinth, but the labyrinth matters because he cannot leave it unchanged.

Gilgamesh seeks immortality and does not receive what he wanted. The journey changes the question.

The physical adventure externalises an internal transformation.

That is why the pattern can survive when the dragons disappear.

The “special world” can be university, grief, parenthood, addiction recovery, a new career, a marathon, entrepreneurship or simply an unfamiliar version of yourself.

The ordeal does not need a sword.

It needs stakes.

Then George Lucas Found Campbell

This part of the popular story is unusually well supported.

George Lucas was not merely placed into the Hero’s Journey retrospectively by film-school lecturers.

He had read Campbell and used The Hero with a Thousand Faces as a direct reference while developing Star Wars.

StarWars.com’s account describes Lucas as having studied Campbell from the early development of the films. Lucas later called Campbell “my Yoda”.

The two men did not actually meet until after Lucas had finished the original trilogy.

That is another useful correction.

Campbell did not sit next to Lucas while he wrote A New Hope.

The book came first.

The influence travelled through the work.

Later, Campbell watched the original trilogy at Skywalker Ranch and the connection became public mythology in its own right. Lucas then helped support the filming of Campbell’s conversations with Bill Moyers that became The Power of Myth.

In other words, the influence eventually ran both ways.

Why Star Wars Fits So Well

Luke Skywalker begins in an ordinary world so ordinary that he is essentially a bored teenager complaining about chores.

Then:

• the message from Leia provides a call;
• Luke initially resists leaving;
• Obi-Wan becomes mentor and supernatural helper;
• the destruction of Luke’s home makes return to the old life impossible;
• Mos Eisley and the Death Star become thresholds into a larger, dangerous world;
• Luke gains allies, faces enemies and experiences loss;
• the ordeal culminates in confrontation and risk;
• and the hero who returns is no longer merely the farm boy who left.

It works because the mythology is structural rather than decorative.

Lightsabers, spaceships and droids are new.

The underlying movement is ancient.

This may be Jimmy Carr’s strongest point.

If Joyce was absorbing myth into modernist literature, Campbell was extracting recurring patterns from myth, and Lucas then built a modern popular myth using Campbell as one of his guides, Star Wars really does sit inside a strange lineage running from ancient storytelling to twentieth-century experimental fiction and back out into mass culture.

Hollywood Simplified Campbell

The 12-stage Hero’s Journey most of us recognise owes a great deal to screenwriter and story consultant Christopher Vogler.

Vogler encountered Campbell’s work while studying film and later wrote an influential studio memo, A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

He translated Campbell’s sprawling comparative mythology into something story departments could actually use.

Vogler’s own account makes clear how deeply the memo entered Disney’s story culture. He recalls seeing the storyboard for the project that became The Lion King marked with the twelve Hero’s Journey stages.

That does not mean Campbell secretly wrote The Lion King.

It means Hollywood turned comparative mythology into a working development tool.

The Ordeal: What If the Hero’s Journey Is Too Neat?

A framework this attractive eventually creates its own problem.

Once you know the Hero’s Journey, you start seeing it everywhere.

That can mean you have discovered something profound.

It can also mean you have become very good at forcing different stories into the same box.

Campbell’s comparative method has been criticised for flattening distinct cultures into one universal pattern. Myths emerge from particular places, religions, social structures and historical conditions. Similarities matter, but so do differences.

There are also obvious gender problems in some of Campbell’s original terminology and assumptions.

Maureen Murdock, who had studied Campbell’s work, later developed The Heroine’s Journey because she believed the model did not adequately describe women’s psychological journeys. Feminist scholarship has continued to examine both the usefulness and the limitations of Campbell’s framework.

The problem is not solved simply by changing “he” to “she”.

A deeper question remains:

Collective stories, cyclical stories, domestic stories, stories about care, stories without resolution and stories in which transformation happens through community rather than heroic individualism may operate differently.

That critique matters enormously when marketers get involved.

Because marketers love a template.

Give us twelve boxes and we will have a workshop booked before lunch.

Form, Not Formula

The sensible way through is to treat the Hero’s Journey as a lens rather than a law.

Vogler himself repeatedly warns that it is not a rigid formula.

The Campbell Foundation makes the same point.

The value lies in asking:

• What is changing?
• What does the protagonist want?
• What makes leaving the ordinary world necessary?
• What resistance appears?
• Who or what helps?
• What must be lost, confronted or learned?
• Who returns?
• And what can the transformed person now give, understand or do?

Those are excellent questions.

They are not instructions that every story requires a literal mentor on page 17.

Part III · Return

Why Marketers Fell in Love With the Hero’s Journey

By the time the Hero’s Journey reaches marketing, something interesting happens.

The hero is no longer necessarily a fictional character.

The hero becomes the customer.

That is the useful version of brand storytelling.

A weak brand story says:

We were founded. We struggled. We innovated. We became brilliant. Buy from us.

The brand casts itself as Luke Skywalker and the customer is reduced to the person buying a ticket to watch.

A stronger story asks:

What journey is the customer already trying to make?

Then the brand can become mentor, tool, ally, guide or threshold object.

This overlaps with the broader principles I discuss in Storytelling in Marketing, but the Hero’s Journey adds a specific idea:

the story is not interesting because a product appears; it is interesting because somebody changes.

Nike: Greatness Is the Journey, Not the Celebrity

Nike’s 2012 Find Your Greatness campaign is one of the clearest marketing examples because it deliberately moved away from the assumption that greatness belongs to a tiny number of elite athletes.

Wieden+Kennedy described the campaign as shining the spotlight on ordinary athletes around the world and making the case that greatness exists wherever somebody is trying to find it.

That is pure heroic logic.

The ordinary person becomes protagonist.

There is a call: try.

There is resistance: greatness appears to belong to somebody else.

There is ordeal: effort.

And there is transformation: greatness becomes something the individual can claim through action.

Nike does not need to be the hero.

Nike supplies the shoes, the cultural language and the permission to begin.

Reebok: The Hero’s Journey as Self-Transformation

Reebok’s 2015 Be More Human campaign may be an even cleaner fit with the transformation at the heart of Campbell’s model.

The campaign explicitly framed fitness as more than physical improvement.

Reebok described the process as creating physical, mental and social change — people becoming better parents, leaders, teachers, partners and stronger versions of themselves.

That is not really a product story.

It is a becoming story.

The training session is the ordeal.

The transformed self is the reward.

And the brand positions itself as part of the equipment, community and mindset that makes the journey possible.

There is an important marketing lesson here.

People often do not buy transformation because they enjoy the ordeal.

They buy because of who they believe may exist on the other side of it.

Apple: The Customer as Creative Rebel

Apple’s Think Different campaign is not a literal 12-stage Hero’s Journey.

That distinction matters.

There is no tidy ordeal, no explicit threshold and no on-screen return with an elixir.

But the campaign uses the psychology of heroic identity brilliantly.

Steve Jobs introduced the campaign internally in 1997 by talking about the need to return Apple to the basics of great products, marketing and distribution, and about people with passion changing the world.

The famous campaign celebrated people who challenged convention.

Apple was not saying:

Our computer is the hero.

It was effectively saying:

Perhaps you are one of those people too.

The computer becomes a tool of agency.

The customer is invited to identify with the rebel, creator and world-changer.

That is Hero’s Journey logic without pretending the advert itself contains every stage.

It is also one reason the campaign fits so naturally with Apple’s later status as an identity brand. You can read more about that wider storytelling approach in Steve Jobs at 70: What Marketers Can Still Learn From Apple’s Master Storyteller.

Maslow Meets Campbell

This is where another theory kept nagging at me while researching the Hero’s Journey.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

There is no simple historical line saying Campbell borrowed the Hero’s Journey from Maslow or vice versa.

They are different theories addressing different questions.

But conceptually they touch.

In his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation, Abraham Maslow described self-actualisation as the tendency to become what one is capable of becoming.

The musician makes music.

The artist paints.

The person fulfils potential that otherwise remains unrealised.

Campbell’s Hero’s Journey also centres transformation.

His description of the supreme ordeal and boon is not just about gaining treasure. It can represent an expansion of consciousness and being.

That sounds very close to the emotional promise behind many of the best “heroic” brands.

Nike is not really selling rubber and foam when it tells you to find greatness.

Reebok was not merely selling gym kit when it asked people to Be More Human.

They are attaching the product to an imagined better self.

And premium brands often operate somewhere in the territory between Maslow’s esteem needs and self-actualisation: achievement, recognition, mastery, identity, status and the idea that a purchase symbolises who the person has become.

But there is an even more interesting connection.

The Return With the Elixir Looks a Lot Like Self-Transcendence

Maslow’s popular pyramid usually ends at self-actualisation.

His later thinking did not.

He increasingly wrote about self-transcendence: going beyond the self towards service, meaning, unity or something larger.

I have written separately about Maslow’s forgotten sixth level.

That later idea makes the final stage of the Hero’s Journey feel even more interesting.

The hero does not merely achieve personal enlightenment and disappear into a nice retirement.

The hero returns with the elixir.

The boon comes back to the community.

Prometheus brings fire.

A king returns with wisdom.

A healed person can heal.

A transformed individual can contribute differently.

That is not just self-actualisation.

It begins to look like transcendence.

Why Luxury and Premium Brands Can Feel Heroic Without Telling a Hero Story

This also helps explain why status products can sometimes feel connected to the Hero’s Journey even when their advertising does not contain a conventional narrative.

A premium object can operate as evidence of transformation.

The watch, car, bag or other status symbol can function like the returned elixir: a visible marker that the customer has crossed from one imagined identity into another.

But we should be careful.

A status signal is not automatically a Hero’s Journey.

Sometimes a luxury advert is simply selling scarcity, aesthetics or recognition.

The useful question is whether the brand connects the product to a meaningful transformation:

Who were you? What did you strive for? Who have you become?

That structure is heroic.

A photograph of an expensive object with a famous person standing next to it is not.

The Brand Is Usually Better as Obi-Wan Than Luke

If there is one thing marketers should take from all of this, it is probably this.

Stop making the brand the hero.

The customer already has a life.

They already want things.

They already encounter barriers.

They are already moving between identities.

A useful brand enters that journey in a supporting role.

Obi-Wan does not complete Luke’s journey for him.

He gives him a lightsaber, a larger frame of reference and enough guidance to cross the threshold.

That is a much healthier model for brands than constantly shouting about how inspirational the company itself is.

A Practical Hero’s Journey for Brand Storytelling

If I were reducing all of this into something actually useful for a marketer, I would not use twelve mandatory boxes.

I would use six questions:

This is not “Campbell’s six-step marketing model”.

It is my attempt to bring something useful back from the journey without pretending a 1949 comparative mythology book was secretly a conversion-funnel handbook.

And Now We Return to Finnegans Wake

Which brings me back to the audiobook.

I started it because Jimmy Carr connected Joyce to Campbell, Campbell to the Hero’s Journey and the Hero’s Journey to Star Wars.

I wanted to understand that chain.

What I found was messier and more interesting.

Campbell did not write a dissertation on Finnegans Wake.

Joyce did not invent the journey Campbell described.

Campbell did not invent the myths.

George Lucas did not simply copy Campbell.

Vogler’s 12 stages are not Campbell’s original three-part essence.

And brands do not become compelling merely because a strategist can squeeze an advert into a circular diagram.

But the connections are real.

Joyce gave Campbell the term “monomyth” and a modern literary world dense with recurrence, myth and transformation.

Campbell spent his life looking for recurring patterns across human stories.

Lucas consciously used Campbell while creating one of the defining popular myths of the twentieth century.

Hollywood made the framework practical.

Marketers borrowed it because transformation is one of the most powerful things a brand can promise.

And somewhere along that path, I began an article knowing very little about the Hero’s Journey and finished it by realising that the process of understanding it had followed the pattern itself.

There was an ordinary world.

There was a call.

There was certainly confusion.

There were mentors — Joyce, Campbell, Lucas, Carr, Maslow and several people who would probably object to being placed in the same sentence.

There was a labyrinth.

And now there is a return.

That is as useful for a myth as it is for a film.

And when marketing earns the right to tell a story of genuine transformation, it can be useful there too.