| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
In this future world -- extrapolated with convincing and sometimes frightening detail by Bester -- we are introduced to the protagonist, Gulliver ("Gully") Foyle: "He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead..." Foyle is a former nobody, a man who had lots of potential but never had to use it, completely lazy, doing the minimum he could to get by, who is suddenly marooned in space with no escape. Even this isn't enough to motivate him beyond trying to find air and food on the wreck; he hasn't learned enough to know it's possible to find a way out of his situation. But he is galvanized to action when an apparent rescue ship deliberately passes him by.
In a sense, The Stars My Destination is simply a SF rewrite of a far older classic, The Count of Monte Cristo. It's the study of a capable, vengeance-driven man who escapes from an apparently impossible situation (twice, in Foyle's case) and returns as an utterly different man to wreak the vengeance that he was denied under his old name. Unlike many other Monte Cristo homages, however, Bester's is written with language fully as evocative as the original's, and with added intricate plot threads that make Gully Foyle's odyssey unique.
The novel also conforms to what Joseph Campbell, in his The Hero with a Thousand Faces, calls "the monomyth": "The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation--initiation--return...which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth." As he summarizes it, "A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow men." At the ending of Bester's novel, Gully Foyle returns with powers to bestow on humanity, only what they are is wisely left to the imagination of the reader.