Throughout the book Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden, we see many different ways of survival at play throughout the different stories that they tell. The different types of survival that the characters had to go through had a huge effect on who the characters were and how it affected their story arch and it had a lot to do with their archetypes.
If we have a look at all of the different sacrifices that have happened throughout the book, it can relate a lot to the characters archetypes and the roles that they play with one another. Let’s take a look at one of the very first sacrifices that we read about. When Xavier leaves to fight in the war he is sacrificing his freedom, his previous life and the people in it. This correlates a lot to the hero archetype because of their general story, they lose their familiar environment with a task, almost always ending up in a fight. But, it also goes along with the hero’s strong will to do good and to fight for what is right.
Another sacrifice that it made is how Niska sacrifices her needs to be with others to carry on the traditions of her culture. This goes along with the great mother, who has a need to protect others. In this sense, she sacrificing her human needs to carry on the tradition for future generations and to respect past generations. It wasn’t until she started having visions about her Nephew and retrieved him from the school to raise him in her cultures traditions, that her sacrifice was worth it in the end.
If you haven’t already gathered from articles, movies, books, documentaries, etc., War can change people. If we look into Elijah’s death we see that he was slowly losing himself in the fight and the drugs which caused him to lash out and get himself killed by Xavier. He ended up this way because he pretended to be someone that he wasn’t and got out of a lot of situations by using deceit as his main weapon of defence. This follows along with the trickster archetype and he ended up tricking himself until he fell down a dark hole that he could not get out of which resulted in him going insane and getting put down by his best friend.
You can find a lot of these example in many different sources such as movies and books, and there will always be a connection to the archetypal literary theory because it’s a fundamental in writing even if you don’t realize that you’re doing so.
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