A Critical Analysis of Hero's Journey Archetype in the Story of Bizhan and Manizheh

With the rise of the scientific study of mythology in the twentieth century, mythological approaches were widely applied to the analysis of literary texts. In doing so, the critic attempts to penetrate into the deep layers of the meaning of a text and extract a recurrent pattern that is shared by other stories.
Joseph Campbell redefined the field of mythological criticism by developing the idea of "hero's journey archetype" which was later modified by his followers including Christopher Vogler. After studying a wide variety of myths from different nations, Campbell asserted that the hero progresses in the story in a formulaic pattern which is repeated in all stories, with minor variations, in form of a mental grammar and which ultimately leads to the perfection of the hero's personality.
Many stories from Shahnameh readily lend themselves to an analysis based on hero's journey archetype. The story of Bizhan and Manizheh is not an exception. In this story, Bizhan responds to the invitation of an external call, i.e. Keykhosrow, and leaves the ordinary world behind. Having overcome the problems, he then comes back to his land with a personality change which is represented by his marriage to Manizheh. This paper seeks to offer an analysis of the story of Bizhan and Manizheh based on the pattern of hero's journey archetype