The Heroic Journey

After re-reading the Hobbit, I had the opportunity to really understand the beauties the story has to offer. First, I wanted to talk about the development of Bilbo Baggins and his role in this story. Ok, so who is Bilbo Baggins? He is the hobbit that is afraid of what the world has to offer outside of his home. After being visited by a wizard named Gandalf who wants to take Bilbo on an adventure, Bilbo reluctantly declines the offer due to being afraid of what is outside of his hobbit hole. I think this says a lot about Bilbo, its makes him really relatable and seem real. This amazing character is afraid of what the world has to offer and doesn’t want to find out. Later into the story Bilbo really leads this group through the adventure, when the others are down and not knowing what to do he makes the group decision. It is a huge improvement in responsibility and matureness; Bilbo becomes the biggest impact for the group where at the beginning he showed lots of weakness. The biggest scene that defines Bilbo is when they find the cave with all the gold and the big dragon, Smaug. I think this book has a really interesting hero setup, we learn about the hero’s week side immediately. Bilbo is small, scared, timid, and afraid of the big world. We know he wants adventure, but is afraid of commitment and what the world has to offer.

The way Bilbo’s character develops as a hero can be related heavily to a general hero layout. The hero is usually a underdog, or someone has a big problem that they are usually afraid of or not ready to face. An example that I have is the main character from Jaws, he is in this place were true horror and fear are. He is pushed to his limit when he has to conquer his fear of the sea, by going on with two other people to kill the huge shark. The hero is usually pushed into doing something they know they must do, but are reluctant to do it till its something they cant run from any more. Once they finally face their fear and conquer the task, that’s when we really see these characters develop into the heroes we see them to be.