The Hero's Journey

One version of the journey follows this pattern:

• ‘Home’ is threatened
• The protagonist suffers from some kind of flaw or problem
• The protagonist goes on a journey to find a cure or the key to the problem
• At the story’s midpoint they find a cure or the key
• On the journey back they’re forced to face up to the consequences of taking it
• They face some kind of literal or metaphorical death
• They’re reborn as a new person, in full possession of the cure; in the process ‘home’ is saved.

Fairy tales beat back the stress that disorder can cause by putting the world back in order. As Marina Warner argues in Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale, they convey a hope that order can come about even in the face of almost unexplainable acts.18 Child abandonment and neglect, rape and death, fairy tales take away the randomness by putting these acts into a larger, explainable structure and offering insight on how to process them.

We are drawn to stories that make things feel a little less random, just as we are drawn to storytellers who seemingly simplify complexity. We are all aware of disorder and the natural uncertainty that follows it and are attracted to stories that reduce it.

By turning individual struggles into common experience, fairy tales put order into the disorder of “assault, cruelty, and injustice.”19 Many of these stories follow ordinary people confronting extraordinary events. “The structures of wonder and magic open ways of recording experience while imagining a time when suffering will be over.”20 The familiar structure offers hope that suffering can end.

Familiar fairy tales can be reassuring because we know how the story will unfold, even when its characters do not. Their structure gives otherwise bewildering events a place in a sequence. This is a way to make sense of disorder, not evidence that real events follow a hidden plan.

“The landscape of fairy tales is symbolic: ‘the forest is where you are when your surroundings are not mastered’.”21 Fairy tales provide a means of mastering your surroundings by presenting a way to understand your world, giving it some order and helping you make your way through it.

An archetypal narrative may feel familiar and offer an escape from uncertainty. As the quoted argument puts it, “in order to stay sane we must impose some kind of pattern.”22 This is what narratives achieve, and it’s the same reason we craft them within our own lives. They give us a sense of a coherent identity.

It is interesting that fairy tales cross cultural and geographical boundaries. Similar stories occur in many places. Sometimes this is due to exchange via travel. The stories carried by wanderers were then modified and built on in their new homes easily because their structure had already occurred. Often, though, fairy tales in different cultures are very similar even when it’s not believed they were shared through travel. They are a common cultural phenomenon. So it is understandable that they have a lasting, worldwide appeal. The staying power of fairy tales “suggests that they must be addressing issues that have a significant social function.”23 By informing behavior in a similar way, fairy tales combat entropy by creating a common understanding that most people can interact with.

Between the Grimm Brothers and Pixar, the role of fairy tales has been explored and revisited through lenses that change as society evolves. They are not necessarily the things they once were in terms of their role in social norms. But just because they’ve changed doesn’t mean that humans have ceased to use stories to beat back disorder. Entropy is a thermodynamic concept; its use here is a metaphor. A story can give experience a coherent shape without changing the physical entropy of the world.