Why a definite article was used here in front of something (seemingly) not specific?

Question

I'm going through Outcomes Advanced Workbook and in chapter 2 there's a text about Cinderella with the following sentence:

Folk literature abounds with tales of the poor underdog who makes good, and Cinderella echoes this well-established theme.

I'm trying to understand why a definite article was used in "the poor underdog" instead of "a poor underdog" - after all, we're not talking about any specific underdog, are we? If the author had written "a poor underdog" instead, how would that have changed the meaning?

As a bonus question, could no article + plural (as in "tales of poor underdogs who make good") be used here? Would it make any difference, other than stylistic?

Answer 1

Take a look at the following examples:

the poor = poor people the rich = rich people the needy = needy people the deprived = deprived people the displaced = displaced people

In all of these, "the" indicates that we're talking about poor/rich/ etc people in general.

If the text said "a poor underdog", then it would be only talking about Cinderella, while it's talking about "all poor underdogs" in works of literature.

Answer 2

The X simply means the writer/speaker thinks you should already know "which Y" he/she is talking about; Y is often X but can sometimes be something related to X. A/an X means that "which" doesn't matter.

Folk literature abounds with tales of the poor underdog who makes good, and Cinderella echoes this well-established theme.

"The poor underdog" is a trope. It's also a common trope, and the writer basically is assuming you already know that.

In situations like this where someone uses the X and you don't actually know which X he/she means, that's a signal that you've missed something or need to catch up on earlier conversation.

Answer 3

In a sense, it is specific, describing a character type repeatedly found in a formulaic plot, i.e., a stereotyped character.

In genre detective stories, one might read "Philip Marlowe looked at the woman with a jaundiced eye," or "Sam Spade looked at the woman with a jaundiced eye," or just generalize the plot, ""The hard-boiled detective looked at the woman with a jaundiced eye."