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Saving Private Ryan and the Archetypal Search
- Joanna Gardner, PhD
- 1 hour ago
- 6 min read
On a visit last fall to the American Cemetery in Normandy, I saw the grave markers of two American brothers side by side who died in the Allied operation to liberate France in 1945. But after Robert and Preston Niland sacrificed their lives, the U.S. Army realized that two other Niland brothers were in the war as well: one missing in the Pacific theater and another fighting in Europe. The Army’s fateful decision to reassign the living Niland soldier away from the front would later inspire Steven Spielberg’s 1998 film, Saving Private Ryan.
In the movie, the Army realizes that three out of four sons of a fictional Mrs. Ryan have been killed in action, and the fourth, Private James Ryan, is lost behind enemy lines in the chaos following D-Day. The Army hierarchy understands that this mother of many must be spared the insupportable grief of losing all her children, the way the Greek goddess Demeter had to be spared the grief of completely losing her child Persephone. In this way, Mrs. Ryan resonates with a mythic figure whom Joseph Campbell calls the “Great Mother” (Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, eBook 91).
So the Army sends a squad of Rangers on a collective journey into the underworld of Nazi-occupied France to find Private Ryan, the Great Mother’s lost child. The Rangers must scour a wasteland of war to find one unremarkable soldier among thousands dressed exactly like him. In searching for Private Ryan, the squad assumes the mantle of the Seeker archetype.
The courage to search
Saving Private Ryan is an imaginal plunge into the full-body commitment soldiers make to war: its horrors and hurts, its blood and its brawls. From the famous sequence that recreates D-Day to to the final fight protecting a strategic bridge, the immediacy and realism of the film’s battle scenes testify to the courage required to put oneself in harm’s way in order to save others.
The Seeker archetype requires courage, too. The Seeker appears when something is missing, lost, or not yet achieved—in other words, a situation of vulnerability. Although the search can lead to discovery and new knowledge, the Seeker must accept that there’s no guarantee they’ll like what they find, if they find anything at all. They can only search from a place of not-knowing. Will they find what they seek? Will they win or lose? Live or die? These unknowable questions take on heightened urgency for Seekers in wartime and therefore require heightened courage.
Still, the Saving Private Ryan Seeker squad sets out. They encounter deadly distractions and competing priorities. They make hard decisions. They keep going when everything seems impossible. They pool their courage and skills. The collective capacity of a team of Seekers is far more than the sum of each individual’s.
A team of Seekers
If a wartime Seeker summons a special kind of bravery, a team of wartime Seekers leads to a surge of Seeker courage. What’s more, each Seeker trusts the rest of the team to play their part, freeing everyone to focus on their own tasks. Each functions as a safety net for the others and for the mission. If one falls, others will step into the breach, dress wounds, carry the search forward. In addition to greater combined courage, this increase in focus and resilience are gifts of a collaborative, collective hero’s journey. For more about collective journeys, I highly recommend the work of John Bucher, the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Executive Director, starting with his MythBlast A Call to a Collective Adventure.
Saving Private Ryan’s Seekers might look like each other from a distance, but they have unique and complementary skills: captain, technical sergeant, medic, sniper, light machine gun specialist, translator. In other words, anyone can be a Seeker, and each soldier represents a particular capacity that this search requires. Seeking alone, none could succeed, but when each lends his powers to the search, they can save the Great Mother from further suffering.
The collective capacity of a team of Seekers is far more than the sum of each individual’s.
For whom they all seek
The mission makes no sense in a financial cost-benefit analysis—sending a squad of elite Rangers to find one nondescript private—but it is essential for the life force Mrs. Ryan represents. In other words, it makes soul sense.
At home in the heartland, surrounded by endlessly vast wheat fields, Mrs. Ryan represents the bountiful Great Mother and the soul of America, or what Campbell might call the nation’s “power of life” (Goddesses, eBook 219). Her silent presence permeates the film, from dying soldiers calling out for Mama (11:39, 1:31:18) to stories the squad tells about their mothers (1:09:20, 1:09:42, 1:09:58) to their many references to upsetting mothers back home (21:33, 43:22, 45:22, 1:39:09, 1:51:05). The movie’s plot runs on the truth that the Great Mother can only take so much suffering before the land begins to wither, and her sons represent a generation at risk. If they all die, the nation can’t survive. The image of the Great Mother also makes a sharp contrast to the Nazi metaphor of the Fatherland that seeks to own, occupy, and destroy those whom it considers lesser.
When lost becomes found
I love Saving Private Ryan. I won’t pretend it’s an easy film to watch, but for me it serves as utterly effective myth-making: crafting the events of history with a dash of fiction to create a work of deep meaning and import that tells the soul’s truth. It’s a battle hymn to the courage of the Seeker archetype, to the capacities of a team of Seekers, and to the Great Mother whom they fight to protect.
Does the squad succeed in their seeking? Yes and no. They find Private Ryan, but six out of eight Rangers die in the process. Similarly, the imperfect moral code of the Allies triumphs over the absolutely immoral code of the Nazis after the cost of countless lives.
The Seeker in Saving Private Ryan offers many suggestions for how to search: Scan the horizon. Keep moving. Protect those who can’t protect themselves. Serve, survive, save your companions. Devote yourself to what you love for as long as you can. Summon your courage, leap into the fray, and keep going especially when the search seems impossible. Remember that feeling fear is the only possible way to be brave.
MythBlast authored by:
Joanna Gardner, PhD, is a writer, mythologist, and magical realist focusing on creativity, goddesses, and wonder tales. She is the author of The Practice of Enchantment: MythBlast Essays, 2020-2024 and the lead author of Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide. Joanna serves as director of marketing and communications for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and as adjunct professor in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Mythological Studies program. She also co-founded and co-leads the Fates and Graces, hosting webinars and workshops for mythic readers and writers. For Joanna's updates and additional publications, you are most cordially invited to visit her website at joannagardner.com.
This MythBlast was inspired by Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine and the archetype of The Seeker.
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