The tragic fall of man : Literary archetypes in Dino Buzzati

To fully appreciate the thematic essence of the Italian short-story writer Dino Buzzati it is necessary to understand his use of literary archetypes. As these have been discussed by the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye, the question for the study was whether his theory about the tragic mode could be mapped directly onto the themes of Buzzati and, if there were discrepancies, what impact they had on the received message. The study presupposed the archetypes found in the tragic mode of the fifth phase and in the low mimetic mode as described by Frye, exemplified by Adam and the episode of the fall of man, and found many of them in the short stories collection La boutique del mistero by Buzzati. The narrative follows the archetypal theory perfectly with the cause, fall and effect of the situation, and many tragic characters can be found, such as Adam. However, Frye’s seven cyclic worlds correspond in only five cases, whereas two violate the tragic archetypal laws: the cosmological and the vegetable worlds. The literary effect is that tragedy is perceived as occurring too soon in the protagonist’s life and described by the ironic observational writer as having no effect on the world, leaving the readers with the sense that they too might be excluded from society the way Adam was and prematurely die alone