Subverting The Centenarian Archetype: In The Work The Hundred–Year–Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared By Jonas Jonasson

Archetypal Criticism gets its impetus from psychologist Carl Jung who postulated that humankind shares a kind of universal psyche “Collective unconscious”, which usually gets embedded in dreams and myths and harbours themes and images that we all collectively inherit. Literature, therefore, imitates not the world as it is but rather the “total dreams of humankind”. These archetypes not only impacts the intelligibility of the text but also tap into a level of desires and anxieties of humankind. In the novel The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, Jonas Jonasson tries to deconstruct the age-old archetypal figure of a centenarian.