I am sitting with one of my students, Aaron. He is taking an online class on mythic structure and today’s lesson is on the trickster archetype. According to Christopher Vogler’s book, The Writer’s Journey, a trickster “embodies the energies of mischief and desire for change.” Tom Sawyer is a trickster we all know. Who else could get others to trade him toys and food for the chance to whitewash his fence, the chore he was supposed to do by himself? Br’er Rabbit is another example of a trickster with his entreaty, “Please, please, Br’er Fox, whatever you do, please don’t throw me in that briar patch!” This, of course, is exactly where Br’er Rabbit wants to go so he can escape.
I was thinking of examples of tricksters in my own life. Of course, we have all been tricksters as kids, saying to our parents on the day of a big test we’re not ready for, “I just can’t go to school today. I feel so sick.” Smart parents require bona fide symptoms such as a temperature over 99 degrees before they’ll allow little tricksters to stay home. Not so smart tricksters can be found out playing basketball a few hours after that major illness, or eating popcorn while watching a movie after claiming they have “the worse sore throat ever.”
My brothers were fairly well accomplished tricksters growing up. My brother John would claim he was going over to spend the night with his friend, Greg, then drive the sixty miles to Dallas for the evening. He was all of sixteen. My brother Sam would say he was going to bed early, pretend he was asleep, then sneak out in the middle of the night. Oh, I guess I did that, too, on more than a few occasions. Take my little VW out with one of my girlfriends – pushing it to the end of the block before starting it – then go “riding around” for an hour or so. Of course, I had never counted on the police in my little town seeing me in the middle of the night and telling my dad about my escapades when he was down at the Gem Café having coffee the next morning. Luckily, my friends and I weren’t doing anything other than driving up and down the main “drag” in town. Still, my dad let me know that he knew what we were doing. That took most of the fun out of it.
Tricksters can run the gamut of behavior from just having fun all the way to evil. But, mostly, they are around in stories to add a little lightness, a little comic relief, a little bit of “Ah, yes, I wish I’d thought of that” to a tale. We all need a bit of the trickster in ourselves and in our lives. After all, a little mischief never hurt anybody.
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