Essay On Archetypes In Death And The King's Horseman

Stories from across vast time-periods, wildly different cultures, and distant geographical location share many common themes, plot structure, and especially character tropes. In the 20th century, legendary psychologist Carl Jung theorized that these similarities come from a collective human unconsciousness; so as a result, most characters in stories follow certain patterns, which allow us to place them into common archetypes (Edinger 1968). Knowing this I developed an interest in identifying this archetypal patterns in stories myself and will forward this interest by identifying archetypes in the Wole Soyinka play, Death and the King’s Horseman. I have gathered three sources that I will use to help me do so, a website, a scholarly article, and a magazine article. Each one of these sources has its own strengths and weaknesses. The magazine article gave great insight on the archetype of the shadow but lacked any information on the other archetypes. The website article I retrieved will be the most useful for my endeavor as it was written by one of the leading Jungian psychologists and provides much information on many of the different archetypal characters. Lastly, the scholarly article I found will be useful as a guide for my paper since it attempts to apply the same Jungian archetypes to the work Demain. …show more content…
This will limit the amount I will be able to reference this article in my essay but the “shadow” archetype analysis in this article was so thorough and informative that this article will still be extremely useful in my research. It was published in the American Poetry Review, a subscription based magazine whose sole purpose is to analyze and discuss poetry. This makes this source incredibly reliable and