Ana bib 3

Gregory Dwyre
Pledged
Annotated Bibliography

Vogler, Christopher, and Michele Montez. The Writer's Journey : Mythic Structure for Writers. Boston: Michael Wiese Productions, 2007. 49-80.


In this section Volger focuses on the people/archetypes that the hero might encounter. These include the threshold guardian, the herald, the shape shifter, the shadow, and the ally. The threshold guardian is an interesting character, they are the person who stands in the way of the hero from entering a new world. I like how Volger said you are not suppose to defeat them but to incorporate them. In many stories you can see what Volger is talking about when he says there is a symbiotic relationship between villain and threshold guardian. I feel that what the threshold guardian stands for is the hero’s inner demons in physical form.
The Herald I felt was like a mentor with out the guidance. He herald comes in gives the hero a challenge and a kick in the butt to get him started. I liked how Volger said that the Herald doesn’t have to be a person, that it could be a storm or such.
The shape shifter was one of the more difficult characters to understand and felt that it could be stretched among a lot different situations. The nature of the shape shifter according to Volger is to be shifting and unstable. This character appears to be changing constantly from the hero’s point of view. In most stories these characters are witches, wizards and such. He focuses the shape shifting idea more to how girls and guys act and how we think they are suppose to act, such as mood swings.
I found this to be a very hard character to understand. The shadow is used to represent the dark side, the unexpressed, unrealized, or rejected aspects of something. I really liked how he broke down this part of the shadow saying that the shadow “can be all the things we don’t like about ourselves, all the dark secrets we cant admit, even to ourselves.” The important thing that Volger points out is that the Shadow might not be 100% evil and that it can be a good idea to humanize them.
The Ally plays an important role. They are then to provided company guidance help to the hero during the journey. They can act as the heros conscience when the hero is able to use it. I liked how Volger says that a important job of the Ally is to humanize the hero making them more open and balanced. The hero could have one Ally or a thousand.
The last character that Volger talks about is the Trickster. This is one of my favorite characters. I like the humor they add and the fun chaos. Their job is to cut down big egos down to size and bring people down to earth. I liked how there can be a trickster hero, those are always funny.





When reading these it was interesting to see how there were two lines to the characters. One was clear, as “this is what this character does”. The other line was fuzzy and many different archetypes seemed to be strangely familiar. The mentor and the Herald seemed to play very similar roles. This might be why certain characters wear different masks at different times. Over all I liked how with many of the characters he wrote about he related them one way or another to our lives and how by understanding these character we can understand obstacles in our life.

Questions
1) Can these archetypes be a mixture of the different kind ex can you have a anti/trickster hero?
2) Can the shadow be good?
3) By understanding these archetypes is it really possible to deal with problems in you r life better?
4) Are there ever characters in stories that don’t follow any of these arechtypes?