Character & Image
Prototype
A prototype is a real historical or contemporary person whose life and traits became the basis for creating a literary character. The prototype is only the raw material: in the process of creative transformation, typification, and invention, the writer departs from the concrete prototype, so that the artistic image is not identical with it. The degree of the image's closeness to the prototype varies — from documentary portraiture to a distant impulse for the imagination. The study of prototypes (part of genetic, biographical literary scholarship) helps to understand the creative history of a work but should not replace the analysis of the artistic image with a 'search for the original.' In Ukrainian literature, known prototypes include the historical Pavoloch colonel Ivan Popovych — the model for Ivan Shram in Panteleimon Kulish's novel 'The Black Council'; the semi-legendary poet Marusia Churai — the prototype of the heroine of Lina Kostenko's historical novel in verse.
Compare “Prototype” with another term
Meaning, origins and distinction — side by side.
Distinction
Two sources of an image, polar in nature. The archetype is a PRIMAL, universal, impersonal scheme from the collective unconscious (Jung), an inherited proto-image (the Mother, the Shadow, the Hero) that structures the work from within the psyche. The prototype, conversely, is a REAL concrete person, historical or contemporary to the author, whose life became material for a character. The archetype is universal and invisible; the prototype, singular and documentary. One comes from the depths of the psyche; the other, from a real biography.
