Examples of the call to adventure

Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces describes a structure common to hero myths which begins with the call to adventure:

A blunder—apparently the merest chance—reveals an unsuspected world, and the individual is drawn into a relationship with forces not rightly understood.

Novato, California: New World Library, 2008, p. 42.

In stories, the call to adventure is experienced by the protagonist, and the audience vicariously, as something magical. What’s happening is the protagonist feels ambivalence toward an internal desire, and an external event, often quite mundane, tips the scale of ambivalence to “let’s try this.” Contrast between the mundanity of the invitation—a person, setting, or event that ordinarily would be paid no heed—and the desire welling up in the protagonist is what gives the scene its sparkle.

Here are the calls to adventure from a few of my favorite books and television series:

Conservative Mary Ann Singleton in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City has already decided not to return to Cleveland from her vacation in San Francisco, and finds herself an awkward houseguest at the apartment of sexually liberated high school friend Connie Bradshaw, when she comes across a listing for an apartment on Russian Hill’s Barbary Lane.

It was a well-weathered, three-story structure made of brown shingles. It made Mary Ann think of an old bear with bits of foliage caught in its fur.

She liked it instantly.

The landlady was a fiftyish woman in a plum-colored kimono.

“I’m Mrs. Madrigal,” she said cheerfully.

New York: Harper Perennial, 2007, p. 13.

Patrick Murray, a self-involved video game designer on Michael Lannan’s Looking, rides the Muni train from a really bad date to his ex’s bachelor party, when he’s chatted up by Richie Donado Ventura, a down-to-earth barber in a perfectly crooked San Francisco Giants baseball cap.

Charler Ryder, a middle-class history student at Oxford in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, has been lectured by his cousin Jasper on how an undergraduate should behave and specifically advised to change his ground-floor rooms to prevent fellow students dropping in for alcohol, when aristocratic Sebastian Flyte, known to walk around campus carrying his Teddy-bear, leans drunk through Ryder’s window and gets sick.

What have been the calls to adventure in your life? Tweet to @bcgriffin.