While the tropes and structures of the Hero's Journey—the pattern identified by Joseph Campbell as corresponding to the progression of the adventures undertaken by the protagonists of heroic narratives—have become increasingly familiar to readers and consumers of literature, films, and other popular cultural texts, it is worth noting that individual texts seldom present the pattern in its entirety. In chapter three of The Hero with a Thousand Faces , Campbell writes “When the hero‐quest has been accomplished … the adventurer must still return with his life‐transmuting trophy” (193); it is in this way that they become “Master of Two Worlds,” achieving the balance and growth that they set out to find when they first crossed the threshold into the belly of the whale, and thus are afforded “Freedom to Live,” the final stage of the pattern. If the monomyth is about the movement of the individual toward becoming what they are ultimately meant to be, as opposed to what they were before their journey, then it must follow that the achievement of a single goal (however big) cannot signal the end of the process. In Fun Home— Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, or “family tragicomic” as the author herself subtitles the text—the protagonist (a younger version of Bechdel) has already both moved out of the house where she grew up and come out as a lesbian when the events that propel her toward investigating her father's past occur. By leaving home, she has heeded the call to adventure and crossed the threshold into the belly of the whale. Her understanding and acceptance of her sexuality corresponds to apotheosis, in as much as it signals the death of her old self and her resultant rebirth into her adult persona. Ultimately, her announcement of this sexuality can be interpreted as representing the granting of the Ultimate Boon. As The Hero with a Thousand Faces explains, though, in order to benefit from this boon, Bechdel must first take it home with her, both physically and temporally.