The Heroine's Journey in Birds Without Wings by Louis de Berniéres

Louis de Berniéres is one of the most accomplished novelists of the 21st century and his books are among the best-sellers. As a postmodernist novelist, de Berniéres deconstructs the history and constructs it with a postmodernist approach using monomyths and archetypes. This thesis studies the heroine's journey in Birds Without Wings, which is written in 2004, translated in several languages, and represents one of the greatest works of de Berniéres. We encounter with several mythical structures throughout the novel as apocalypse myth, Aphrodite myth, Medusa myth, or most importantly, the hero myth. In his book Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell defines what the hero's journey is and explains the stages of the hero's journey creating a pattern in the myths. However, the heroine's journey is different from the hero's journey in that it has more psychological elements rather than being simply a physical journey. Maureen Murdock, in her book The Heroine's Journey, reorganizes the stages of the heroine's journey in which the inner journey of the heroine is more emphasized. In this thesis, I am going to study the journey of Tamara and Leyla and try to explain their inner journeys using monomyths and archetypes.