Monomyth In Paul D Angelo's The Step Not Taken

Despite its brief length, Paul D'Angelo's The Step Not Taken is at its essence a monomyth. Monomyths represent a character's transition from innocence to experience by means of a journey. They are comprised of three stages: separation, struggle, and return and reintegration, and are one of the most widely used archetypes in literature. By being able to identify them, a deeper understanding of the author's message can manifest.

Monomyths are initiated by separation. It is the stage at which a character, usually unwillingly, is pulled from their ordinary life so that they can embark on a journey. When D'Angelo's story begins, he is completely unaware that his life is about to change. It is the man in the elevator that sets his quest in motion. "Typical junior executive material," D'Angelo describes him. "Nothing at all to indicate what was about to take place." It is when the man starts to suddenly weep that D'Angelo is pulled from his daily grind and presented with his quest: to understand responsibility according to the suffering of others. The succession of separation from the
ordinary realm and intervention from his benevolent guide is so rapid, so closely linked, that it is difficult to recognize the separation stage at all. As the stages progress, each equally fleeting in duration, the moral of D'Angelo's essay unfolds.

Struggle is the most prolonged stage. It is the juncture at which a character explores their own unconscious domain, and which presents them with hardships and tests. In addition to guiding D'Angelo, the man in the elevator tests him: "Should I go up to the 15th floor and make sure he's okay?" D'Angelo writes. "Should I search him out from office to office?" Faced with the pain of a fellow human being, he wrestles with alternatives. "I didn't know what to do. So I did nothing." D'Angelo fails his test, but the completion of a journey is not necessarily dependant on triumph. In the story of Snow White, the protagonist fails three consecutive tests before completing her journey. It is the gaining of wisdom that ultimately dictates whether or not a quest is successful. "And now he haunts me," D'Angelo says. "Not with fear, of course, but with a great sense of regret. Like so many things in life, I know now what I should have done then." Through remorse, D'Angelo demonstrates his epiphany of the shortcomings of passivism, and is ready to return to the ordinary realm.

Wrought with regret, D'Angelo does not want to end his journey.
He wants to atone for his failure: "I hope that somehow he gets to read these words, because I want him to know that I'm pulling for him. That I hope things are looking up for him. That I'm sorry." Part of reintegration is sharing with society the wisdom gained from the journey. By writing about his experience in the elevator, D'Angelo spreads the warning of passivism's consequence: "I should have thrown caution to the wind and done the right thing. Not the big-city thing. The right thing. The human thing. The thing I would want someone to do if they ever found my son crying in an elevator." Human beings share a responsibility to take care of one another. If we only look out for ourselves, it is impossible to coexist peacefully, and the world cannot function. For D'Angelo, it took a journey to come to that
realization.

D'Angelo's journey, though ephemeral, was at its core a monomyth. He was separated from his normal existence, struggled through hardship, and returned to everyday life upon reaching epiphany. Viewing his essay through a monomythical lens enlightens us to its similarities with other works of literature, and allows us to look beneath its surface. It is not simply a story of remorse, but a warning of the danger in passivism.