Treasure Island Flashcards
The middle class
A class of social grouping based on occupation, material wealth, education and social status.
Literate
Able to read and write language through the written word.
Protagonist
The hero or main character in a narrative.
The hero’s journey
An often repeated narrative structure which involves a central protagonist leaving the known world and undergoing challenges to achieve both spiritual and material reward and status. This journey can be both metaphorical and literal.
The ordinary world
The world inhabited by the protagonist before his or her journey begins, which enables readers to identify with and understand the hero, and which provides a place to compare and contrast with after the journey begins.
Status quo
The existing state of affairs; things as they currently are.
Character archetype
Categories of character, such as hero and joker, which recur across many texts with similar characteristics and role within the plot.
Mentor
A character - often older or more experienced - who provides training, motivation, insight or equipment necessary for a hero to undertake the upcoming journey.
Ally
A character who accompanies the hero, offering support, assistance and friendship.
The extraordinary world
A world that strongly contrasts the hero’s ordinary world - often typified by adversity, ever-increasing danger, and strange or unknown peoples and settings - through which the hero’s journey must be made.
Antagonist
The opposing character within a narrative who incites both the tensions and the actions of the protagonist.
The ordeal
A common element in the Hero’s Journey narrative structure wherein the hero faces a moment of life-or-death crisis, faces a great fear and/or confronts a most difficult challenge, and wherein s/he might even experience “death.”
Resurrection
A common element in the Hero’s Journey narrative structure wherein the hero emerges from the extraordinary world, cleansed or purified, and can be considered “reborn.”
Coordinating conjunction
A class of words that connects two elements of equal grammatical ranking within a sentence, and frequently used to join two independent clauses in order to create a compound sentence.
Compound sentence
A sentence comprising two independent clauses, joined by a coordinating conjunction.
