The Stars My Destination: Where the Anti-Hero Basically Becomes God

From the beginning of the novel, I knew that I was not going to like Gully Foyle; I mean, you're not supposed to, as he is an anti-hero. In recent media, some anti-heroes have been spun to be redeemable, and Gully Foyle is not even close to any of them until possibly the end. This may be due to his arc being similar to that of the hero's journey featured in many fantasy novels. He does skip a few steps here and there, but overall goes through stages such as death and rebirth, transformation, and atonement.

Gully's overall transformation from a rather dim oaf, to a cunning aristocrat, to the people's savior was jarring to say the least, but it did act as a measure of his journey throughout the story. I first thought that the aristocrat part was the end of Gully's transformation, but he could not have fully gone through the transformation section of the hero's journey without having gone through his "death and rebirth" phase. To me, that only occurred when he realized Olivia's involvement with his original situation and then his discovery of space-jaunting. It took him giving up his core desire for vengeance to truly transform, becoming the wise burning man he is at the end of the novel.

With its wild plot twists and interesting character development, The Stars My Destination can easily be aligned on certain points along the hero's journey; it's a retelling of such as story in an imagined future with a character who quite literally goes from a nobody to the most important man in the universe.

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