Response and Mentor

In these sections, Vogler expands on the next two stages of our Hero’s Journey, the Refusal of the Call and the Meeting with the Mentor. Each hero’s response to the call varies, depending on the nature of the journey. One hero may accept the call right away or even seek it out, while others immediately refuse by avoiding it or providing excuses to delay their acceptance. The hero may be positively affected by deciding to refuse when the call ends up being a destructive journey. To aid the hero’s journey, a relationship is formed with a mentor or role model. Vogler includes the importance of the guiding mentors in Greek mythology. He also advises the writer to avoid the cliché mentor and encourages them to creatively reconstruct them.

The way the hero responds to the call determines the significance of the journey by pointing out risks and consequences of the hero. The hero may be forced to choose between two calls; internally and externally. The delay caused by the initial refusal may produce unfortunate circumstances to the tragic hero. Vogler gives the example of Chiron, who was the centaur mentor of many Greek heroes; the prototype of the Wise Elder. He also explains how like Athena, one character can be a mentor in more than one way. With the help of a mentor, the hero gains supplies, knowledge, and confidence which are essential to the outcome of their journey. Sometimes the audience is mislead by what they believed was a Mentor ending up being negative to the hero.

Once again Vogler points out connections between archetypes due to their purpose in advancing the story. In Kafka’s Metamorphosis, we see how the hero’s delay could potentially cost his family due to their debts. In the 1930s clip in class, we saw the women accepting the internal call to empowerment by bobbing their how and a variety of rebellious behavior while refusing the external call to conform to the degradation of women. The doctor, who helps deliver the Indian baby in Indian Camp, provides his son with knowledge, experience and an understanding of birth and death. In each of our own experiences we either initially accept or refuse the call to adventure until we are pushed by an internal or external force. We also experienced the willing hero in the news clip, after rescuing people from a sunken ship.


In the experiences that you wrote about, did your hero immediately accept or refuse the call? If they refused, what was their reason?

An audience can be misled to believe that a mentor is helpful until they realize that they may really be negatively affecting the hero. Can anyone describe a familiar mentor that misleads the audience?

He advises us to reconstruct the typical archetypes such as the mentor to avoid boring the reader with cliché characters. Are your mentors the cliché mentor? If not why not?