In dreams, this is the innocent part of ourselves. A happy child in a dream may reflect a carefree feeling about some aspect of our lives. A sad child or lost child may represent a feeling of being overwhelmed with responsibility. In literature, the Child often appears either as an innocent or in a carefree state, but with problems approaching. Frequently the Child is about to embark on a journey that will take him through a coming-of-age process. This Child often doubles with another archetype, the Hero. Eragon is a Child Hero.
The Prophet or Wise Elder
In dreams, this is the wise part of us that perhaps wishes to influence or comfort the less certain parts of ourselves. In literature, this (generally) aged person can lead the Child Hero to wisdom. He is a key player in countless stories through history, but since we’re discussing the Inheritance Cycle, let’s acknowledge Obi-Wan Kenobi of Star Wars and Gandalf of Lord of the Rings, both of whom compare strikingly to Brom of Eragon.
The Lover
In dreams, this archetype is someone whose face or aura we are drawn to romantically, and often represents the romantic part of ourselves that seeks completion. It is both a wish and projection. The Lover allows both dreamers and artists to exercise the side of themselves opposite their gender. As Virginia Woolf stated in A Room of One’s Own, all great artists should be “androgynous in mind,” and every day artists draw up excellent characters of the opposite sex, projecting from their own psyche. Princess Leia of Star Wars, Arwen in Lord of the Rings, and Arya of the Inheritance Cycle are projected similarly from male writers.
The Shadow
In the Shadow, the darker more repressed aspects of ourselves find an outlet. The Shadow contains all the feelings we would not like to admit possessing when we are awake. People who dream of monsters and wake up screaming are often thought to be facing an emotion or situation that is too painful to face while waking; that emotion or situation is said to be kept in their Shadow. In literature, the Shadow generally produces our antagonists. Shadow archetypes usually thwart the Hero on his journey toward greatness and are responsible for a great deal of the story’s tension. Projections of the Shadow include Darth Vader, Sauron, and Galbatorix.
The Savage
The Savage is the manifestation in dreams of our instinctive or primal side, and can have either negative or positive connotations. The Savage can appear as anything, from a small, rat-faced creature to a voodoo priest imparting words of wisdom. In literature, the Savage sometimes shows up to help out the protagonist when conventional wisdom has failed him. Yoda in Star Wars is an example of a positive Savage. Negative Savages include the Inheritance Cycle’s Urgals, and Lord of the Rings’s Orcs.
The Parent
Regardless of whether our relationship with our parents is peaceful or tense, we will dream the Parent archetype as noble and upstanding. The dream Parent often symbolizes a sense of comfort and security that conjoins with the wisdom of the Prophet. Dreams of Parents being injured or being violent symbolize a perceived threat to our security. In literature, if the Parent is unknown, obliterated, or in danger, it often propels the coming-of-age journey. Luke’s Uncle Owen in Star Wars Episode IV and Eragon’s Uncle Garrow in Eragon both play this role. Both met violent deaths via the foot soldiers of corrupt governments, and a desire for justice triggers both Child Heroes’ departures for journeys with their Prophets.
Flip the genders of certain archetypes and you have mildly different implications, and of course both literature and dreams are surrounded by a host of support players who fit these and other archetypes. In Lord of the Rings Gollum could also be interpreted as an infusion of the Savage. Many versions of the Savage appear in the Inheritance Cycle, most notably the Urgals and the Ra’zac. In Star Wars, R2-D2 represents the Child archetype insofar as his computer noises and jumps and whinnies reflect innocence.
This scenario, where the Child Hero embarks on a coming-of-age journey, may not seem to fit Lord of the Rings, as Frodo Baggins is an adult at the start of his journey. But ultimately it may. Sometimes archetypes can be symbolized by a group rather than an individual, in which case the “Hobbit nation” would assume the archetype of the Child. This is implied by their tiny stature and their undisciplined, adorable, and yet indulgent natures. And while Frodo Baggins may remain fully Hobbit at the end, his death may represent a transcendence akin to coming of age.
I have left Paolini’s dragon for last, because Paolini has included some intriguing twists that seem to defy definition. Amidst the archetypes found in the dream center or collective unconscious are many symbols—so many that psychoanalysts have devised uncounted “dream dictionaries” to shed light on these symbols. But in nearly all, one will find the symbol of the “reptile” or “lizard.”
In psychoanalyst Eric Ackroyd’s A Dictionary of Dream Symbols , the appearance of a “lizard” in a dream “may represent something in your unconscious that you don’t wish to take notice of.” And dreams recorded with slithering lizards do often inspire the dreamer to feel either a sense of fear or revulsion. In much of literature, the dragon has been an antagonist, an instrument of the Shadow.
Eragon’s Saphira is a unique twist on the typical literary dragon in that (1) she is a protagonist and an instrument of the Child Hero, (2) she is intelligent more than primal, and (3) she is decidedly female. Ackroyd has a definitive entry for “dragon,” which is lengthy, but one definition in particular relates to Saphira: “The dragon may represent the devouring aspect of (your relationship with) your mother. ‘Slaying the dragon’ may therefore mean putting an end to whatever attachment to your mother is detrimental to the process of finding your own psychic individuality.”
Slaying the dragon, then, might imply a very comfortable and healthy relationship between the author/creator and his mother (literal or symbolic). The fact that Eragon scrapes the skin off his legs the first time he rides his dragon had me wondering if a Mother figure close to Paolini was at times abrasive and fire-breathing. But Saphira is also both loyal and beloved, and unless Saphira is fueled by something that breaks with the conventional symbols of dreams analysis, she symbolizes a closeness, mutual respect, and friendship with parental figures.
But let’s examine whether Saphira has potentially transcended the usual connotations. She almost seems like a vortex of archetypes falling into one another: she’s not quite the Lover, but her intimacy with Eragon (for example, in their exchanging thoughts without words) is Lover-esque. She’s not quite the Mother, but as Eragon never had a mother, Saphira is put somewhat naturally into a proxy position. And finally, the two are not only best friends, but cross-gender best friends. Having a cross-gender best friend is not the norm in real life, but it is a huge fantasy among average people, representing what we sense would be a perfect balance of character traits, male and female.
Saphira is also, according to many, the most intriguing character in the novel and one of the key ingredients to its success. I’m back to wondering about the impact of homeschooling in the creation of this novel, this time as applies to Saphira, because I’m not certain that this type of character could have arisen from a mind that placed institution (school) at its center of affection as opposed to home (where a parent is usually the nucleus).
Part of the reason Saphira is such an intriguing character may have to do with Paolini’s age. He is in a unique position compared to other authors who write the coming-of-age tale: He is writing the coming-of-age tale while, in fact, coming of age. And it’s possible that such unique immediacy infused his dragon as a very dynamic vehicle for the Child Hero’s journey. Ackroyd also describes the winged dragon as symbolizing “some kind of transcendence, some passing from a ‘lower’ to a ‘higher’ level of personal maturity.”
Through all of this, we can see that Paolini is doing something quite different from the accountant reconciling columns of numbers. He and the accountant are reaching into entirely different parts of the brain for their work. The accountant is reaching primarily into the information pro
cessor, but Paolini is reaching often into his dream center. During the creation process, characters and settings and even plot details began to materialize much like they do in dreams, but because the author is awake, he can make some choices, do a bit of molding, erase, and go back if something isn’t working.
For example, Paolini does say that he gave a lot of thought to whether Saphira should be intelligent or primal. But the circumstances of her initial appearance, or the fact that she has blue scales instead of green, or the fact that she was injured in her wings and not her foot in Eragon—these manifestations might be as mysterious to him as the images tossed forth in dreams are to us.
In interviews, Paolini emphasizes that success is largely attributable to good editing, discipline, and conscientious presentation. None of these things have much to do with the subconscious, and his statement is correct. However, in both graduate school and the many workshops I have led, I have seen writers exercise these disciplines—sometimes for decades—without producing a salable manuscript like Paolini did. Hence I would like to make one more point about how he met with success.
Let’s go back to the dream closet of Freud and Jung and the various things that lie on the shelves. When Jung coined the term “collective unconscious,” from which archetypes emerge, he gave us a very important concept for understanding how and why certain writings like Paolini’s are successful.
Here is the concept, simplistically put: The collective unconscious implies that my closet looks very much like yours, and Christopher Paolini’s looks like ours. Paolini is able to grab us and keep our attention because the images that drop off his hangers and dance for him have the same effect on him as they do on us.
Writers who are successful have managed to find the items in their collective unconscious that are (1) very intriguing to them—such that they have enough fun writing that they bring the novel to completion—and (2) equally intriguing to the reader.
I am talking here about reader interest. Did Paolini have long talks with himself about what would interest his prospective reader? I doubt it. And doing so doesn’t matter. One can hit as a matter of luck, at least at first. Paolini must have created a world that we would want to be in, or we would not have stayed there. Certainly entire books like this one would not be created about his tales.
I believe in this writer-reader relationship concept wholly, and I can best describe it through my own life. One of the greatest days in my writing career happened early on in my twenties, when I finally admitted to myself I was not Albert Einstein, I was just your average Josephine. It could have become a very sad moment, looking back on myself as an average student, who never broke a thousand on her SATs or attracted a teacher’s attention outside of the writing arena. It was actually an exciting revelation. Why? Because it meant that what interested me would probably interest other average people—average readers, of which there are thousands—and if I found a way to write about things that were most intriguing to me, I would probably be writing about things that were intriguing to many. A career was born, one far different than Einstein’s—but if Einstein had tried to write a popular novel, his audience being a limited number of erudite scientists, the results might have been horrendous. I can look into the minds of others and anticipate what will sell, not because I’m some sort of genius but because I’m so wonderfully average.
Granted, I write in the teenage mainstream, and Paolini has entered the realm of sci-fi/fantasy. It could be that readers therein are given to higher IQs than my readership—perhaps—but I would not carry the burden of genius too far in trying to understand this young man’s abilities. Paolini went ahead with what was most intriguing to him and, in the process, had enough instincts to keep what would be most interesting to his readers and shy away from what would not.
There’s nothing flowery or tricky about much of writing. It’s not so much in the words; it’s in the imagery, and in the ability to create a writer-reader relationship—which is very similar to a boy-girl relationship except that, in the former, the parties are caught in a weird time warp. If a girl rings a boy’s cell phone, he picks up and answers after a second. But when the writer writes, the reader doesn’t pick up the pages for months or years. Yet the response and the relationship are very real; just ask publishers, who bank fortunes by having faith in this concept.
I emphasize this relationship because I have seen its importance often overlooked in writing classes, whether at the junior high, high school, college, or graduate level. It annoys me to no end, and Paolini, having never suffered the woes of learning writing via mega-institution, seems to have come out ahead. Professors are paid to read papers; they have to read. Perhaps that is why so many forget that readers do not have to read anything that they don’t feel like reading. Hence the writer-reader relationship is a critical part of understanding the art of writing.
I learned this as a young journalist who enjoyed feature writing for newspapers. My paycheck was at stake: If I didn’t catch the audience and keep them, I wouldn’t have an audience . . . and eventually, I wouldn’t have a job either.
Paolini had a lot of time to play, to entertain himself thoroughly, to paint a world that appealed to him in almost every way. Beyond that, he employed a gut instinct about what captivates, what bores, what works, what aborts. The proof of his success is that what he had to say, readers chose to hear, to the tune of millions of copies.
We’re still hearing him. So is Hollywood. If he can hold up under the weight of contracts and obligations on his “play station,” we’ll be hearing him for a long time.
Carol Plum-Ucci has authored many young adult novels published primarily by Harcourt. The Body of Christopher Creed and What Happened to Lani Garver are studied in high schools nationwide, as both were named Best Books for Young Adults by the American Library Association’s young adult division, YALSA. The Body of Christopher Creed and The Night My Sister Went Missing were finalists in the Edgar Allan Poe Awards, and The Body of Christopher Creed was named a Michael L. Printz Honor Book by
YALSA.
Plum-Ucci lives in southern New Jersey, and all her novel settings pay homage to the South Jersey barrier islands and the Pine Barrens, which have housed her family for fourteen generations. She has a bachelor’s degree from Purdue University and a master of arts from Rutgers, and she attributes her greatest training as a writer to working as an editor on her college newspaper, the Purdue Exponent. Her sequel to Streams of Babel, called Fire Will Fall, is slated for Spring 2010, and she recently finished a sequel to The Body of Christopher Creed, to be released Fall 2010.
The Modern-Day Perceval
JOSHUA PANTALLERESCO
People are fond of noting the heroic archetypes strewn throughout the Inheritance Cycle, but outside of some broader pop culture references and a few necessary references to Joseph Campbell, no one has really examined Eragon’s cultural and mythical genealogy until now. Pantalleresco shoxs us how Paolini drew upon a classic arhcetype (one that was around long before Luke Skywalker) to give Eragon traits and characteristics that would made him familiar, noble, and relatable to reades in modern times. The parallels are striking, as is the realization that the kind of character embodied by Eragon and his predecessor Perceval tryly is timeless.
A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.
—CHRISTOPHER REEVE
Heroes are the foundation of epic fantasy. I’ve enjoyed heroic tales ever since I picked up my first comic book at the age of eight. There was something larger than life about someone making a difference that stuck with me. It influenced me to read my first fantasy novel. Fantasy and comics aren’t that different at heart: Both feature great evils bent on destroying all the heroes hold dear, whether it’s something personal like their family or something larger such as their hometown or even the whole world. What fascinates me to this day is how each hero responds to crisis.
There are different kinds of heroes.
Some are like Superman or King Arthur and possess all the tools to become a great hero—they have the skills, the knowledge, and the inherent conscience to know right from wrong. Then there are the heroes like Perceval, who have to learn what the right thing is, and are heroic because of their courage and despite their limitations.
Perceval is my favorite kind of hero. He’s one of the earliest characters in literature that starts out like you or me. He struggles with the finer details of good and evil and, like us, doesn’t know all the answers. Many characters after him have had similarly humble beginnings. Take, for example, Peter Parker. Peter is a science kid from Queens who is bitten by a radioactive spider, giving him fantastic powers. Destiny calls out Peter with the death of his uncle and drives him to become Spider-Man. Another example is Bilbo Baggins of The Hobbit. Bilbo is just another hobbit in the Shire when Gandalf enlists his aid to recover gold from a dragon and he’s thrust into action.
This archetype appears over and over in fantasy and is used for many reasons. For one thing, it’s easier to sympathize with a character that doesn’t know and can’t do everything. While everyone recognizes that Superman and King Arthur are good, heroic characters, they are very hard to relate to. Most of us are not born destined to become a great king or be faster than a speeding bullet. The appeal of this type of character is that they represent the best of who and what we might be and may someday become. They do the right thing for no other reason than because it’s the right thing.
Secrets of the Dragon Riders: Your Favorite Authors on Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle: Completely Unauthorized Page 10