Blog #8
I feel that I have an overall good understanding of the belly of the whale archetype. To me it means that when ever you hit rock bottom and you can’t go any farther down something inside of you helps you rise up and discover you can be a different person. This has happened in both Watership Down and The Odyssey. There are also many other stories and movies where this archetype is found.
In Watership Down the belly of the whale archetype is found when one of the rabbits (Bigwig) gets caught in a snare trap. The other rabbits tried to help the Bigwig but couldn’t find the peg to get him out. Finally they ended up finding the peg to release the snare and free the rabbit. Bigwig fell out of the trap and land without movement. The rabbits were very scared because they thought that he was dead, but all of a sudden Bigwig rose up and was fine.
In the Odyssey the example of the archetype would be when the solider were trying to get into the city of Troy but could not do it. They had no luck with this and they were at a stand still. They thought that all of them were going to be killed, but someone came up the the idea of the trojan horse that would end up saving them all. One of the poems that I thought represented this archetype would be “The End of the World”. This poem talks about how everything is fine and all of a sudden something bad happens and everything turns dark and it seems like there is nothing that will make it better.
