Volume 34, Issue 3, November 2021, Pages 643–656
Fiston Mugisho Ntanga1
1 Teaching assistant, Department of English and African culture, ISP-Kaziba, Bukavu, South-Kivu, RD Congo
Original language: English
Copyright © 2021 ISSR Journals. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
It has been found out that the appearance of characters in different literary works around the world, tend to look alike and sometimes readers confuse them by the fact that they play the same roles. This is because the writer paints his characters according to the shape and existing models so that his work may be taken in the depth of other existing works around the world. Thence, characters, due to this fact, in a literary work appear as intelligent, polite, courageous, coward, rich, poor, etc, and play roles of chief, thieve, killer, ambassador, minister, crowd, messenger, elder, advisor, etc, by looking like other characters found in other literary works. The understanding of characters’ roles in a literary work helps the reader attribute different archetypes to them, like hero, villain, mentor, scapegoat, outcast, good mother, femme fatale, young innocent, evil mother, etc. This has been done in this paper by the fact that all the characters acting directly with Okolo, the main character of the novel under study, look like other characters in other works around the world. So, different archetypal patterns are drawn from the roles Gabriel Okara attributed to his characters. Some of his characters fit more than one archetype like Okolo and Tuere who are called scapegoats, outcasts and young innocent thanks to different situations in which they are found. To carry out the present work, the library, documentary and internet were used as main methods while the close and repetitive readings and comparison were taken as major techniques.
Author Keywords: Character archetype, archetypal criticism, literature, role playing, the voice.
Fiston Mugisho Ntanga1
1 Teaching assistant, Department of English and African culture, ISP-Kaziba, Bukavu, South-Kivu, RD Congo
Original language: English
Copyright © 2021 ISSR Journals. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
It has been found out that the appearance of characters in different literary works around the world, tend to look alike and sometimes readers confuse them by the fact that they play the same roles. This is because the writer paints his characters according to the shape and existing models so that his work may be taken in the depth of other existing works around the world. Thence, characters, due to this fact, in a literary work appear as intelligent, polite, courageous, coward, rich, poor, etc, and play roles of chief, thieve, killer, ambassador, minister, crowd, messenger, elder, advisor, etc, by looking like other characters found in other literary works. The understanding of characters’ roles in a literary work helps the reader attribute different archetypes to them, like hero, villain, mentor, scapegoat, outcast, good mother, femme fatale, young innocent, evil mother, etc. This has been done in this paper by the fact that all the characters acting directly with Okolo, the main character of the novel under study, look like other characters in other works around the world. So, different archetypal patterns are drawn from the roles Gabriel Okara attributed to his characters. Some of his characters fit more than one archetype like Okolo and Tuere who are called scapegoats, outcasts and young innocent thanks to different situations in which they are found. To carry out the present work, the library, documentary and internet were used as main methods while the close and repetitive readings and comparison were taken as major techniques.
Author Keywords: Character archetype, archetypal criticism, literature, role playing, the voice.
How to Cite this Article
Fiston Mugisho Ntanga, “Character archetypes in Literature, a picture of what exists elsewhere: A Study of Gabriel Okara’s The Voice,” International Journal of Innovation and Applied Studies, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 643–656, November 2021.
