A Comparative Study of the Archetype of Hero's Journey in Literature and Cinema*

This article is a comparative study of the hero’s journey in the myth of Gilgamesh and thefilm named The Deer. Mythologists use different morphological patterns for applying to various literary and cinematic texts.This study aims to investigate to what extent this pattern of the hero’s journey could be found in two works, one literary and the other cinematic. It seems that the film The Deer is similar to the myth of Gilgamesh in its content. In the absence of mythological studies on Persian new wave cinema, the main idea is to use Campbell’s model in an archetypal approach.According to the archetypal approach, three phases are recognized in the hero’s journey as “departure”, “initiation”, and “return”. The present study will analyze these three phases and will conclude that Campbell’s model is well applicable to both works while the film named The Deer shows more resemblance to Campbell’s model than the myth of Gilgamesh.