The past, whether we like it or not, possesses the present in everything we do, see, and read.  The beginning of anything, an untraceable origin, is influenced by the past.  If everything that had ever happened never happened, no beginnings that we have ever heard of would have begun the way that they did.  Every minute detail of the past brings to us a present that has been influenced by that past.  For instance, legends of old, handed down through story and song, possess entire cultures, and mold them into what they are now, in our present.  The hero’s journey, something we have learned about for years in our schooling, has wildly impacted the way we read and write, and has given a platform upon which to build, evidenced in many of our texts, especially in John Barth’s Night Sea Journey. 

              There is a hero in the story, the sperm, fighting towards the destination of its journey, attributed in the title.  While some may say that it isn’t about the destination so much as it is the journey, full of trials and tribulations and obstacles, for the hero of this story and any other, the destination is still the mark that the hero has been successful, and completed the task assigned, and maybe grown from it.  The sperm is in a “sea”, an immeasurable and seemingly unconquerable place.  The journey must be trying, swimming through countless fallen soldiers, thinking that that may also come to be his fate, rendering the journey fruitless. “The heartless zeal of our (departed) leaders, like the blind ambition and good cheer of my own youth, appalls me now; for the death of my comrades I am inconsolable. If the night-sea journey has justification, it is not for us swimmers to discover it.”

            The narrator, our special sperm that makes it to his final destination, has no notable qualities, lending himself to the everyman idea, that anyone (or anything) can accomplish what they have set out to do.  He is an unlikely protagonist, not expecting his success in the least, and almost demeaning himself in the end as the fittest to survive, “…(fitness meaning, in my experience, nothing more than survival-ability, a talent whose only demonstration is the fact of survival, but whose chief ingredients seem to be strength, guile, callousness)…”, calling it a “poor irony”.  The sperm’s unexpected success is bittersweet, as millions of his comrades have fallen in this journey, and yet this sperm is the one to survive, the last man standing.  To have participated in what is essentially genocide, and to have survived, is the burden now placed upon this hero, even as Odysseus, the most obvious of the past’s heroes, saw his crew die before his eyes in Homer’s Odyssey.

            The past, and traditions that have been handed down through our time and this sperm’s time, influence how this particular sperm handles his situation.  Early on, the sperm questions the purpose, his origins and his own existence.  “Is the journey my invention? Do the night, the sea, exist at all, I ask myself, apart from my experience of them? Do I myself exist, or is this a dream? Sometimes I wonder. And if I am, who am I? The Heritage I supposedly transport? But how can I be both vessel and contents?” and later, “"'You only swim once.' Why bother, then?” a question many on their journey have asked themselves in countless situations. 

            As the sperm reaches his destination, he is successful, as the hero’s journey should end.  Burdened with thoughts and new purpose, the sperm is successful, and has grown.  This particular sperm, the unlikely hero of our story, who undergoes the trials and tribulations of any mythological hero, reaches his bewitching destination, his life, his purpose, his love.