Mythology is a way of trying to make sense of life by telling stories which impart certain values, ideas, beliefs, or attitudes. In the ancient world, such stories were told about aspects of the natural world, with the stars in the sky becoming constellations representing stories about the gods, and with natural processes explained in terms of the interplay of those gods. Today, the movies are one of our primary sources of stories aspiring to mythology, and in a case such as the Star Wars trilogy, the filmmaker consciously sought to create a new mythology and to embody in it certain mythic elements. These elements are also evident in the novelization of the first film, Star Wars: A New Hope, by George Lucas. The sense of myth is tied up with the idea of the Force and with the way the young man must train and develop in order to use the Force, an accomplishment that shows both ability and a sense of responsibility such as every young person must develop as they grow to adulthood. The story therefore creates a mythic, science fiction structure to teach a lesson about life.
The film begins as if in the middle of a series of films, with this being chapter four. The book begins with a Prologue that explains the background. Still, the book largely follows the course of the screenplay. Lucas based the film and the novel on two primary sources. One was Joseph Campbell's work mythology and its larger social meaning, centering on the way stories create heroes and reflect the concerns of the audience in so doing. The second source was the source for much of the plot--The Hidden Fortress, a film by Akira Kurosawa. The way the story could be used under such different circumstances--the Japanese film being a tale of medieval Japan, and the Lucas film being set during an interplanetary war in space--shows that it contains strong mythic qualities so that it can be placed in such disparate settings while still having the same heroic and e...