The Hero's Adventure in City of Bones

After watching and taking notes on the speech about “The Hero’s Adventure,” I realized how closely it relates to some of the stories I have read it the past.  In the novel City of Bones by Cassandra Clare.  In it a girl is thrust into becoming a hero when her mother is kidnapped.  Her moral objective is to save her mother.  Later on as the world around her is changing into something she had never seen before (a world of magic), she begins to evolve by getting “marks” on her skin that represents different magical powers that she can possess.  The rest of the magical world had already had these, but now it is her time to get them.  However, through her journey she is faced with a single temptation that distracts her from finding her mother and forces her into falling in love; that temptation’s name is Jace.  She falls in love with him and the world she now lives in.  In other words, she goes through a transformation of consciousness.  He trains her and teaches her how to use her powers then she ends up being stronger than him since she learns of her special ability to draw the “marks” on people and give them temporary new powers.  Jace plays the part of not only the temptation, but also the mentor (though he does not look like an old man, but that’s beside the point).  Another part of this novel is the “departure, fulfillment, return” aspect.  By this I mean that the main character Clary leaves her house and enters this magical world so that she can find her mother, thus fulfilling her quest.  When she finds the mum that had been searched out for many years, there is an evil foe who attempts to keep Clary and Jace from getting the mother back to her home.  They must defeat this foe much like other heroes must defeat the whale or the dragon; she must stay and fight.  This also represents a sacrifice in the fact that she will risk her life in order to save her most beloved family member.  Soon the foe disappears and Clary is left to bring her mother back to their home.  Though there are many complications like the fact that her mother was brainwashed, she still returns home in the end like the same person she used to be, however, now Clary knows the secret powers that her mother has been hiding from her.  The story ended in fulfillment and a transformation.  This journey holds many of the key traits of a hero’s tale.  There are many aspects of this novel that lead me to believe that what we heard in class today is, in fact, true: all hero stories are the same.  This also furthers my belief in what I learnt at the very beginning of the year: all stories are the same; no matter how different they may seem, they are always following the same basic plot structure.  This study of heroes is really interesting in the sense that any hero story can be explained the same way I just explained City of Bones.