- eAlmanac | A Unique Online Reference Source - http://www.ealmanac.com -

 

The Seven Character Types of Vladimir Propp

Posted April 7, 2010 @ 10:12 pm In Numbers,Seven | No Comments

  1. The villain [1]—struggles against the hero
  2. The donor [2]—prepares the hero or gives the hero some magical object
  3. The (magical) helper—helps the hero in the quest
  4. The princess and her father—gives the task to the hero, identifies the false hero, marries the hero, often sought for during the narrative. Propp noted that functionally, the princess and the father can not be clearly distinguished
  5. The dispatcher—character who makes the lack known and sends the hero off.
  6. The hero [3] or victim/seeker hero—reacts to the donor, weds the princess
  7. False hero [4]—takes credit for the hero’s actions or tries to marry the princess.

These roles could sometimes be distributed among various characters, as the hero kills the villain dragon, and the dragon’s sisters take on the villainous role of chasing him. Conversely, one character could engage in acts as more than one role, as a father could send his son on the quest and give him a sword, acting as both dispatcher and donor.

(Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp [5]).

How It's Used

“How silly of John Frow (the party line now runs) to fret about the game of echoes and reflections that all good writers play with their predecessors. The Russian critic Vladimir Propp even proposed that all stories could be rendered down into one of seven archetypes, with golden oldies such as Cinderella or Romeo and Juliet turning up time and again across centuries and continents.”

—Boyd Tonkin, “Watch Out, There’s a Plagiarist About,” The Independent (UK), March 11, 1997.


Links

Beyond eAlmanac
Wikipedia article on Vladimir Propp's Seven Character Types


Article printed from eAlmanac | A Unique Online Reference Source: http://www.ealmanac.com

URL to article: http://www.ealmanac.com/3114/numbers/the-seven-character-types-of-vladimir-propp/

Return to article

URLs in this post:

[1] villain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villain

[2] donor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donor_(fairy_tale)

[3] hero: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero

[4] False hero: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_hero

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp

Copyright © 2012 eAlmanac. All rights reserved.