A Senior Capstone Experience by Dante Chavez ’24

Submitted to the Department of English

Advised by Dr. Katherine Charles

Contributor Biography: Dante Chavez ’24 is a recent Washington College graduate who majored in English with a concentration in Creative Writing and a minor in Computer Science. He is from Baltimore, MD and currently lives in Philadelphia where he is pursuing a career in the publishing industry. During his time at the college, he worked on campus at the Rose O’Neill Literary House as the Social Media & Marketing Intern and was nominated as a finalist for the 2024 Sophie Kerr Prize. He enjoys and likes to think critically about all types of media from books to TV to video games and would like to take what he’s learned at Washington College to create his own piece of media one day. 

Description: “‘Let our souls drive us’: The Monomyth as Rebellion” investigates two texts: The Arabian Nights as translated by Sir Richard F. Burton, a collection of Arabian oral folktales first commandeered and published by Europeans in the 18th century and Atsushi Ohkubo’s Soul Eater, a Japanese manga that makes use of both word and image that ran from 2004 to 2013. This project approaches both of these texts through the lens of a myth theorist, analyzing the narrative structures of both texts and their relationship to the tradition of mythmaking. Additionally, this project also explores the effect that emerges when the two are read together. In my research, I propose that these two texts make use of the hero’s journey (also known as the monomyth) in order to rebel against domineering systems prevalent at the time of each of their compositions. Where The Arabian Nights serves as rebellion against the accentuation of logic and reason in society that was the zeitgeist of the Enlightenment, Soul Eater rebels against the narrative structure of the hero’s journey entirely which can be found in various contemporary texts and media. Using elements of the hero’s journey, I illustrate how both of my primary texts make use of the monomyth to craft their primary arguments. As a result of my research, my project finds that in its rebellion, The Arabian Nights uses Eastern mythology as a mask to hide its agenda to make an exclusively Western portrait of man the divine standard for all humanity. While in its rebellion against the monomyth, Ohkubo’s Soul Eater exposes and rejects a glaring pessimism in this structure that man can’t achieve his full potential without abandoning his humanity. It is through reading these two texts in conjunction that this stark contrast is created: In abiding by the principles of the monomyth, The Arabian Nights is exposed not as a rebel but a colonizer of Eastern mythology for its own ethnocentric benefit while Soul Eater usurps The Arabian Nights as the new counter-cultural myth text in its systematic deconstruction of the machinery of the monomyth. 

Read Dante’s SCE below: