Character types in a narrative

1. Character Types
By Rebecca Burrell

2. Everyman character
‘Everyman character’ = An ordinary person, the typical or average
person – representative of the human race.
An ‘everyman cheater’ is the character that is empathetic to all
regarding the audience. They are usually popular in the fact that
they tend to stand in a larger group of friends whom are more
interesting and supporting towards the narrative.
3 everyman characters: Seth from ‘Super bad’ because he does
everything to get into the bigger crowd to be somebody. Ted from
‘How I Met Your Mother’ because through the entire series he is
represented as that average guy who’s getting old and has yet to
settle down and find someone finally worth marrying to building a
family with. Piper from ‘Orange Is the New Black’ because she is the
average woman who simply made one mistake and it got her in
prison, but she is not the conventional prison type so she is trying to
find her place, her group, and the person she needs to be in order
to survive prison life for 15 months.

3. Archetype
Archetype: Archetype is a typical universal type of
character that is found in many different media texts.
This can be applied to Plato’s theory of forms as he said
that everything in life is a copy of its creator i.e. a writers
characters in a script are copies of people that already
exists – there is no such thing as an original character (no
such things as a character being an ‘idea’ as it was already
there in real life).
Jung said that archetypes are not fixed to characters as
there is an endless amount of different kinds of archetypes,
so characters mostly do not even fit underneath one
category as they can be under many different ones,
especially since archetypes are such a flexible concept.