The road less Heroic; subverting the monomyth in Samrat Upadhyay's the city son

Abstract

This research analyses how the characters in Samrat Upadhyay’s The City Son subvert the traditional heroic journey or the monomyth. This study shows how the novel challenges the traditional notion of heroic quest and uses the anti-heroic traits as a frame to explore and critique the societal, cultural, and individual constructs of heroism. The concept of protagonist and antagonist is blurred in the novel. Almost all the characters move on the trail of anti-heroism guided by their psycho-sexual complexities. The study employs Campbell’s concept of monomyth, Freud’s concept of the individual unconscious, and Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious to interrogate the characters’ personalities. Through this demonstration, the research involves the character's evaluation of actions motivated by personal desires and psychological conflicts rather than objective unconscious motivations. The protagonists in Upadhyay’s novel act as dictated by their unconscious, and their kind of heroism is not aimed towards the benefit of the public good, thus becoming antiheroes. This research thus delves into the depth of the ever-changing evolutionary nature of heroism and its applicability in contemporary cultural and psychological contexts. Keywords: antihero, monomyth, archetypes, hero's journey, contemporary literature, psychoanalysis, and the collective unconscious.