Their Surname Is Also Important: Anti-Archetypical Characters in Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear

Abstract

[Abstract] This paper intends to detach both The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss from what is traditionally expected of fantasy, the literary genre to which The Kingkiller Chronicletrilogy—incomplete as of yet—belongs. First, this project presents Kvothe’s journey as archetypical in fantasy literature by exhibitingits similarity to conventional fantasy adventures—namely The Lord of the Rings—and literary structures such as Greimas’s actantial model and Petzold’s heroic modes. The following section explores the archetypes of the hero, the mentor and the companions by providing some theoretical approaches on them. Next, a total of nine characters are analysed by comparing their functions within the trilogy to the roles they are supposed to perform. Such presumed roles coincide with those previously exposed as archetypes common in fantasy stories; thus, there are five mentors, three companions and a single hero. Their analyses consist of an in-depth study of each character, both individually and in contrast with one another, with the support of several excerpts taken from the source texts. The purpose of such a thorough examination is to display the ways in which they do not comply with the tradition. The conclusions support the intention of this paper: despite presenting itself as another work pertaining to fantasy literature, The Kingkiller Chronicle subtly defies the conventions of this genre through a demonstration of atypically exhaustive character construction.