The Archetypes: Heroes and Mentors

Archetypes

Archetypes are the different types of characters you can find in a story. Carl G Jung defines it as "the ancient patterns of personality that are the shared heritage of the human race". A character can be more than one archetype during the story and the hero can learn from these characters. To identify an archetype is useful to have in mind these two questions: 1)What psychological function or part of the personality does it represent? 2)What is its dramatic function in the story?
The most common archetypes are: The Hero, Mentor, Threshold Guardian, Herald, Shapeshifter, Shadow, Ally and Trickster.

The Hero

In Greek hero means "to protect and to serve". Its purpose is to let the audience identify with it and feel and see what it is feeling or seeing. The main character is the one that learns and grows in the course of the story. The hero is usually the most active person in the story and takes the most risks and responsibilities. A true hero is willing to give sacrifices and to deal with death. A hero can be more appealing if they have some kind of flaw as any human being.
There are many types of heroes: Willing heroes who are committed to adventures with no doubt, unwilling heroes who are full of doubts and hesitations. Anti-heroes who do not act like an stereotypical hero but the audience still feels sympathy for it. Group oriented when there is more than one hero in a group of people, a loner or the hero that decides to leave society and a catalyst who does not change itself but changes others.

Mentor

Known as the wise old man or the wise old woman. It represents the self, the god within us that aspect of personality that is connected with all things. It teaches and trains the hero so it can reach its goal. Also it gives gifts to the hero which can come in handy on the way, but only if the gifts have been earned by learning, sacrifice or commitment. Sometimes it can be the heroes conscience, motivation or sexual initiator.
There are six types of mentors: Dark mentor who helps the anti-hero; fallen mentor who may experience a crisis in their calling, for example death. Continuing mentors who give assignments and set the stories in motion; multiple mentors or more than one mentor for a hero; comic mentor use in romantic comedies usually the same sex as the hero. Finally is the mentor as a shaman who guide the hero trough other worlds and life.

Archetypes seem to be essential for a characters development. It is necessary for the audience to know what kind of role or job is the character playing or doing. This way is easier to understand the character and sympathize with it. Human emotions are a big part of every culture that is why most cultures have the same pattern of archetypes. The hero and the mentor seem to be the most important ones. First you need a main character who is usually the hero with whom the audience can interact and feel empathy for it. Of course most heroes do not start as heroes, they need the guidance, gifts and advices of the mentor to be able to succeed in its journey.

The author mentions how the Greek definition of hero is the same as the motto of the L.A.P.D: "to protect and to serve". He says that the coincidence is incidental, but I do not think so. Probably someone in the department knew the Greek meaning of hero. After all it can be say that they are the heroes of Los Angeles since they protect and keep the peace in the city.
Another fact that caught my attention was how many of the words we use today come from Homer's epic poem. First the title of the poem "The Odyssey", we use the word odyssey to infer to a big predicament. Also Vogler points out that the word mentor comes from this same epic, it was the name Athena took when she disguised as an old man to help Telemachus. I always thought that it was just the word use at the time of translation. It is really surprising how much written works affect our culture and even or vocabulary.

Questions

1. Vogler mentions the most important archetypes but he did not say anything about the antagonist/rival. Do you think it can be count as an archetype?
2. Are the hero and the mentor the two most essential archetypes in a story?
3. When reading a story or watching a movie or TV show, do you always see the story through the eyes of the chosen hero or do you sympathize more with other characters?