Friendly Professor Archetypes

In the book How to Read Literature like a Professor by Thomas Foster a lesson the reader is taught to examine texts in order to find additional meaning. In any text one can find symbols to better identify meaning. Literature can be a movie, book, game, or anything that tells a story. One example of a symbol is a friendly beast. A friendly beast is a character archetype when something, often an animal, helps a hero advance in his quest. One text where this symbol is present is the game Undertale with characters such as Toriel, Papyrus, Alphys, and many others that assist the hero as well as consequence of choice in the relationship with these “beasts”. If one is to look into the lessons taught in Foster’s How to Read Literature like a professor,

While friendly beast may not be the deepest symbol on a list, but when considered with other symbols one may see that this is no surface level symbol. A situation archetype very present in Undertale is a quest. This quest may be the main situation, but within it one could see anymore. The story starts with a quite literal fall, into a journey in which a death and rebirth sparks a battle between good and evil in which Frisk loses innocence in an initiation type situation, friendly beasts being present the whole way. Following the fall, Frisk is almost like a young person from the provinces who the entire time is trying to get back to the human world. The beasts act as mentors to keep Frisk from being a complete outcast and even a hunting group of companions in the end. In the end of the battle of good and evil the enemy is truly a creature of nightmare who in the end has an ultimately good heart. Foster states that “there’s no such thing as a wholly original piece of literature,” as all stories draw from others.(Foster 24) This drawing of conclusions shows that being a friendly beast is only an aspect of a character. A beast may have just as many character archetypes as a