The hero's journey of comic fantasy (based on Terry Pratchett's “Night watch”)

This article examines the hero’s journey of Terry Pratchett’s comic fantasy from the point of its correspondence to the stages of the monomyth proposed by J. Campbell. Despite the fact that the hero of the novel “Night Watch”, Commander Vimes, is not the possessor of special powers and does not oppose “universal evil”, he goes through the same classical stages of the journey that are characteristic of epic or heroic fantasy, closest to myths. In the novel un der consideration, the hero goes through all three phases of the journey of the mythological hero: separation, initiation, and return, but the order of the stages within the first and second phases is somewhat changed. Vimes receives “supernatural aid” only after crossing the first threshold, as he set off on his own initiative, the meeting with the goddess and the temptress are literal, and the father’s functions are performed by young Sam Vimes. The reproduction of the matrix of the journey of the cultural hero of the myth in the novel is due to the very mythological basis of fantasy as a genre as a whole. However, the hero of a comic fantasy is more desacralized than the heroes of epic fantasy: he is imperfect, makes mistakes, is tempted, and doubts the correctness of his actions, thereby drawing closer to an ordinary person. This is natural, since Terry Pratchett’s Discworld universe was originally conceived as a reflection of our reality.