Post 3 - Vladimir Propp

Vladimir Propp

Vladimir Propp was a literary critic and a scholar who founded the idea that there are certain types of characters in each narrative in a book or film. He identified eight different types of characters in the narratives; the villain, the dispatcher, the helper/assistant, the prize, the owner of the prize, the doner, the hero and the false hero. Propp decided this through his analysis of Russian folk tales in the 1920s when the same characters and events repeated throughout each of the stories. In 1928 he published a book, Morphology of the Folk Tale, which had a major influence on literary theorists and practitioners ever since.

Propp extended the Russian Formalist study of language to his analysis of the folk tales and he broke down the tales into small units which he called narratemes or narrative functions, which were necessary for the narrative to exist. Each narrateme is an event that drives the narrative forward. Not all narratemes are present in each storyline, but they often go in the order;

• A family member leaves home
• An interdiction
• The hero ignores the interdiction
• The villain appears
• The villain gains information about the victim
• The villain attempts to deceive the victim
• The victim is fooled by the villain
• The villain causes harm to family member or a family member lacks/desires something
• Misfortune/lack is made known
• seeker agrees to/decides upon counter action
• hero leaves home
• hero is tested/interrogated/attacked
• hero reacts to actions of future donor
• hero acquires use of magical agent
• hero is transferred/lead/delivered to an object of the search
• Hero and villain join in direct combat
• hero is branded (wounded, marked, received an object)
• villain is defeated
• initial lack/misfortune is resolved
• hero returns
• hero is pursued
• hero is rescued from pursuit
• hero unrecognised, arrives home/different country
• false hero presents unfounded claims
• difficult task presented to hero
• task is resolved
• hero is recognised
• false here/villain exposed
• hero is given new appearance
• villain is punished
• hero is awarded/promoted