Detective of Stories

As stated in my previous blog, I was in a void without inspiration, when suddenly inspiration was thrust upon me. Now like I've said before, one of my favorite hobbies is reading. Sometimes I will read 2-3 books at a time, bouncing back and forth between them, but lately I've fallen in love with audiobooks. I listen to them in my car, when I pick up my house, hell anytime you see me on campus with earbuds in, I'm most likely listening to a book on tape. Now this obsession with audiobooks actually began sometime over last summer due to the ending of my favorite book series, The Wheel of Time.
The first book in this series was released in 1991, and the final (14th) volume was just released this January. I first started this series in highschool, and I have reread it multiple times. My tradition usually involves me restarting the series everytime a new book is slated to be released (don't worry I've only had to do this three times). The author himself passed away in 2007 after the release of the 11th book, and they had a ghost writer finish the series from his notes and ideas that he left prior to his death. So needless to say the ending has been a long time coming, and I'm eager to finish it, but I'm still trying to finish my rereading before I can jump into book 14. This is where my audiobooks jump in, becaus my last rereads, have been on the audio version of the previous books.

this isn't even all of them...

 But since my last blog I have been trying to look at the stories in a way a mythic detective would, and it's been pretty enlightning. I was trying to break each book into where it would fit into the Seperation-Initiation-Return area, and I realized that the first 2-3 books are each of the Characters' seperation story, and that books 4-12 are all INITIATIONS! It slowly dawned on me that the bulk of story in each of these books is just pain, and pain, oh and more pain for the characters, it seems like every continuation is another trial by fire (in some cases literally). The thing about this is you see the change everytime they go throught these trials. the main characters in the first book are nothing like themselves in the 5th, hell even themselves in the 5th are changed by the time they reach the 6th.

So i've begun looking at the symbols within the books, and you have a faction that is represented by the snake eating its own tail as seen above(Ouroboros is the actual term), which is a symbol of continuation and immortality.
Another symbol which is described in the book is The Yin-Yang symbol. In the book it is the symbol of the ancient male and female users of the one power, and much like in real-life, it is used to symbolize the balace between the male and female halves of life.
I think my favorite mythological part of the writing though is the opening paragraph that is the same in each book, this is from the very first one
"The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning."