Innocence

 

In the stage of innocence, the world and we are one. We feel no division or separation from others, believing we are, literally, the center of the universe. Suffering is minimal and short-lived, and death is a foreign concept. For the most part, our lives are happy and pleasureful.

 

Initiation

 

Three kinds of events can occasion our fall from innocence: death, an awareness of evil, our sexual awakening. All of these events go counter to the feelings we experience as innocents. Death tells us, first, that someone we love dearly can be irrevocably separated from us; second, it tells us that no one, including ourselves, is immune. Thus, our awareness of death is our awareness of our own mortality. The success of evil violates our belief in the fairness and justice of the world, contravening all the lessons our elders have taught us about rewarding good and punishing evil. If suffering can exist without compensation and bad deeds go unpunished, then our moral compass has failed us, and we are left wondering what the good of good behavior is. Finally, sexuality creates intense desire within us, a desire that can either be initially frustrated or, in the event of a failed relationship, fulfilled and then retracted. The rejection of the emotional intimacy we bring to a relationship makes us wary of loving again, and such a rejection by the person we most trusted damages our confidence in our ability to act wisely. Thus, the temptation of all initiation experiences is to stop growing, for the future now looks dangerous and illogical.

 

Chaos

 

The state of chaos is where all art is created. It is the struggle of our existence to reconcile the information revealed to us through the initiatory experience and move on despite our belief that the future holds only more pain and unrelieved suffering. For many, the desire is to move backwards, to return to a state of innocence, to employ denial against what we do not want to acknowledge. But the true hero is not defeated by this knowledge, instead transforming it into wisdom. Distilling experience, he reconciles the seeming paradox of good and evil and is strengthened by it.

 

Resolution

 

It is important to remember that the hero who advances to the fourth stage does so with open eyes. The hero is not that person who has learned how to evade the knowledge of the fall, but has instead integrated it into a wider, fuller, and truer vision of the world. Mythologically, most heroes advance to the fourth stage, but the intriguing aspect of the modern and postmodern eras in literature is the litany of heroes who fail to achieve the resolution of the final stage: Huck Finn, Edna Pontellier, Jay Gatsby, Willy Loman, Willy Stark, Holden Caulfield. By contrast the heroes and, mostly, heroines of feminist and ethnic literature tend to find a way through the darkness to a kind of peace, as in the writings of Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, Denise Chavez, and Julia Alvarez.