Baby Chicks

Right after they hatch, baby chicks know to run away from hawks. Their parents don’t teach them or do anything to help them learn. It is simply instinctual for them to run away from hawks. Humans respond to archetypes in literature just as the chick responds to the hawk, through the “collective unconscious”. One may not know what archetypes are, but can still identify them. Frye explained archetypes as symbols that occur often enough in literature that people can recognize them. Humans can easily identify these in all types of stories. For example, there is the “damsel in distress” and the “prince”. Some others are the “hero”, “villain”, and the “wise old man”. In The Lion King, the character Rafiki can be seen as fitting the archetype of the “wise old man”. Another example is Gothel, in Tangled. She is the “villain” in the story of Rapunzel. Identifying archetypes is much like Campbell’s baby chick phenomenon. He noticed that newly born baby chicks know that hawks are dangerous and that they should run away. This knowledge is almost instinctual, in the fact that the chicks haven’t learned anything from their parents or other chickens. Humans identify archetypes just like these baby chicks hide from hawks. People automatically notice these reoccurring characteristics unconsciously. One may not be aware that they have identified archetypes, but once someone learns about them, they realize that they have recognized archetypes. The “archetypal patterns that the writer has drawn forward along the tensed structural wires of his or her masterpieces” are just like the baby chicks. The archetypes “vibrate in such a way that a sympathetic resonance is set off deep within the reader”. This means that noticing archetypes is so deep inside us that we recognize them unconsciously, just like the baby chicks run away from the hawks. Observing archetypes unconsciously ties humans together. Archetypes are something that everyone around the world shares. You