Image Credit I actually struggled with this archetype for quite some time. I felt like The Writer to describe Terese Marie Mailhot in her memoir Heart Berries was just too basic. Describing a memoirist as The Writer, how boring! But I also struggled to come up with another archetype. In the end, The Writer just…

Image Credit I’ll be very honest: my first thought for Jo, the main character from Kate Walbert’s His Favorites was the archetype of The Victim. This thought lasted about one minute, after my googling’s showed me that there are connotations to this archetype that I really do not like, mainly the implication that someone is…

Image Credit The day is finally here. It’s time for the first (and potentially only) male character I’ll talk about in terms of archetypes to make his debut here. I thought long and hard about this decision, as my blog is primarily for discussing female characters, but there is really no good way to discuss…

Image Credit R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries is an interesting one. The story of Phoebe, the book's main female character, is not told from her own perspective, but from the perspective of narrator Will. The story revolves around Phoebe. And yet, what we see and know of her comes only from Will, who may or not…

I guess now is the time I tell you that not all of the archetypes I use will be the "traditional" ones. Look up the one I'm using today, and you'll find a few more new-age, shall we say, websites, and then a whole lot on how to use archetypes in your storytelling. For some…

Exploring archetypes in Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi is probably going to be one of my easier tasks. Fairy tales are known for having clear cut archetypal characters, and as a reimagining of Snow White, Boy, Snow, Bird does have characters that fill certain roles. However, unlike the usual fairy tale, the characters in this novel don’t always fit into their roles perfectly and are all the more interesting for it.

Our first book, Red Clocks by Leni Zumas, is undoubtedly the easiest to approach with regards to archetypes. Zumas decided to make it very easy for me and went ahead and assigned the characters archetypes herself, as the characters are referred to as The Biographer, The Wife, The Daughter and The Mender. But that doesn’t mean that my work is done. Zumas may have assigned the characters archetypes, but she left the analyzing each to the reader.