Thankfully Rothfuss is a skilled enough writer that he is able to take the familiar components and make something fresh out of them by having his lead character deconstruct his own legend. Kvothe is living in disguise at the end of nowhere as the owner of a simple inn in a small village. For the year that he has owned the Wayfarer Inn he has kept to himself, barely interacting with his regulars. He serves them their meals and ales, and listens to their designated story teller tell the old tales of an earlier great hero and the evil race of demons that he fought known as the Chandrian.
Things haven't been going that well in the world recently, and there's talk of a third tithe this year as the King's army has been embroiled in a nasty war that doesn't look like it will end anytime soon. Travelling on the road isn't as safe as it used to be, and folk have actually begun taking to locking and bolting their doors at night. Still it comes as a nasty surprise when one of their number is attacked by a nasty spider-like creature that killed his horse and would have killed him had it not been crushed by his dying horse's collapsing on it. Yet that nasty is nothing more than a portend of what's to come. Sure that where there was one there would be more of the spider like creatures, Kvothe sets out to destroy the remainder.
In the process of doing so he rescues a traveller, who as bad luck would have it, was tracking down a rumour that Kvothe was to be found in this part of the world. Devan Lochees is a scribe, a chronicler of stories, events, and natural history. In his own way he is as famous as Kvothe and goes simply by the name of his profession, Chronicler. Needless to say it's his presence that is the catalyst for Kvothe to begin the recounting of his life's story; of which the first seventeen years or so take up the balance of The Name Of The Wind.
It's pretty much the typical "hero's" upbringing: a child prodigy with a gift for learning, he grew up on the road with his parent's troupe of travelling players. Although they were what sounds like that world's equivalent of gypsies, the troupe were skilled enough that they had the patronage of a member of the nobility and were treated well. It was during this time that the two things that would define Kvothe's life occurred; he met his first teacher who introduced him to the workings of magic, and he found out that the Chandrian really existed and weren't just in old tales to frighten children with.
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