In the third article of Character Archetypes Series, we talk about Mentor.

To do this, let us resume our Hero’s Journey.

Our Hero, whom we talked about extensively in the previous article, has now just passed the third phase also called “Refusal of the Call”. Being faced with a difficult situation, he initially refuses to understand or undertake the physical journey.

It is precisely at this moment, in this fourth phase called “the Meeting with the Mentor” that he meets one of the most important characters for him and for the journey itself: the Mentor.

The Mentor acts as a compass for the Hero, advises him and guides him through the narrative.

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In this article of Character Archetypes Series, we talk about Hero.

The Hero is the first of the Characters Archetypes.

Joseph Campbell in his work The Hero with a Thousand Faces talks about it in depth. Campbell’s studies also directly involved Christopher Vogler, a consultant for the Disney screenplays, who in the late 90s wrote a book taking cues from Campbell’s archetypes and his Hero’s Journey also called Monomyth, developing a useful book for the analysis of films and written stories.

So, we see in so many narratives, literary and cinematographic, that the protagonist leaves his “comfort zone” to go to another place to face challenges and inner demons that will lead him to change forever, and then return to his own world, with a different awareness of himself.

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An archetype, by definition, is the first example of something.

Carl Gustav Jung talked a lot about archetypes in the field of analytic psychology. He defined archetypes as the unconscious content of a group that replicates certain behaviors according to particular constants.

From these studies, Joseph Campbell, an American scholar of comparative mythology and history of religions, started to define the archetypes of a narrative, a canvas that guided every narration, albeit with different elements, protagonists, plot and historical periods.

His studies led to the publication in 1949 of the essay “The hero of a thousand faces“.

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