This paper examines the book "The Shipping News" by Annie Proulx which tells the story of Quoyle, a man who begins the book
naive, buffeted by life and passive, but by the end has earned his place in a small town in Newfoundland. It provides a brief synopsis of the plot and attempts to analyze Quoyle's story from the point of view of a hero's
journey and a theory of mythology developed by Joseph Campbell in his book, "A Hero of a Thousand Faces". Campbell states that there are twelve steps that underlie most of mythical story telling which can be applied to every hero of
modern literature. It shows how in " Quoyle does undergo the twelve steps of a hero, although in a modern fashion and how his journey is more of self, an internal voyage of discovery than of one of a hero.