The Wanderer Archetype in Donna Tartt’s Novel "The Goldfinch"

Abstract or Introduction

The Goldfinch is a novel by Donna Tartt wherein it contains a story as told by Theodore Decker (Theo) in a retrospective first-person narration. It is a story of a lad who loses his mother when a terrorist bomb explodes to kill her plus dozens of other attendants in an art fair. Theo finds himself alone but he becomes determined to evade the city which looks up to taking him as an orphan. This leads to Theo seeking refuge in a school friend’s, Andy Barbour, wealthy family residence. Theo Decker's desire to explore and better understand the world makes him a quintessential wanderer. The story ends as Theo travels around the world to make things right by purchasing the fake antiques which he had previously sold. This paper explores more about the wanderer archetype in Theo; one of Carl Jung’s twelve archetypes namely the caregiver, the creator, the explorer/wanderer, the hero, the innocent, the jester/fool, the lover, the magician, the orphan (ordinary boy or girl), the ruler, the outlaw and the sage. In the Jungian concept of the wanderer, a person with this archetype abandons the known to explore and discover the unknown.