Pilgrimage and Return: A Preliminary Study on the Prototype of James Gunn’s Transcendental Novels

Abstract

Archetype is the path to the unconscious, myth is one of the forms of archetype in ancient times, and science fiction is a modern myth. What science fiction and myth have in common is the reflection on the current order and the imagination of the unknown world (the dream about the unknown). James Gunn’s “Transcendent”, science fiction series is a contemporary re-writing of Campbell’s heroic model, as well as a re-creation of the pilgrimage narrative model in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with Jung’s immutable archetype lurking behind it. This paper attempts to explore the prototype and mechanism created by James Gunn through the analysis of the hero mode and pilgrimage journey in this series of science fiction. The driving force behind the pilgrimage mode and hero mode is the process of subverting people’s spirit of having no support and longing for direction based on the development of science and technology and trying to find the right answer. It is a manifestation of the human panic at the loss of direction and the growing sense of impending doom.