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the result that he has to make the second, much longer Voyage and Return which begins when he abandons Solveig for far-off lands. Here, in this distant `other world', the initial Dream Stage of his selfish, hard-hearted rise to great wealth turns first to frustration, then to the nightmare of his visit to the lunatic asylum. But even the second `thrilling escape' of the shipwreck which lands him back in Norway only leads him to the final nightmare of his confrontations with the Button Moulder and the Devil, which force him at last to recognise what a monster he has become. He thinks there is no longer any part of him which remains uncorrupted, that he is now nothing but his hideous troll-self, a wrinkled and deflated balloon of egotism, deserving nothing but death. Only now does the reunion with Solveig finally teach him that all along there has been another quite different part of himself, identified with her as she remained in remote obscurity. He has come at last to that much deeper level of awareness which, as his `other half' emerges from her long eclipse, shows him discovering his true self.

The next plot we came to, Comedy, gave even greater prominence to the hero who becomes the chief `dark' figure of his own story; and who must be brought to `recognition' of things hidden before he can achieve the happy ending. In this light, the story of Peer Gynt is entirely familiar. As in so many comedies, we see a hero and heroine who meet in the opening scenes and fall in love; but are then torn apart by a terrible misunderstanding, rooted in the hero's egotism. The hero ine passes into eclipse, obscured in the shadows cast by his selfishness. Confusion continues to worsen until the impasse is finally resolved in the only way it can be: by the `recognition' which brings the hero to see the nature of his error and the true, superior value of the heroine, thus bringing him to himself.

The essence of Tragedy, of course, is that it focuses on the process whereby the hero is transformed into the chief dark figure of the story more starkly than any other kind of plot. Indeed, as we saw, Tragedy can provide us with a kind of mirror image of an Overcoming the Monster story, seen from the point of view of the hero who has been transformed into the monster. Certainly the opening scenes of Peer Gynt present us with a situation similar to the opening of a tragedy. The hero is clearly a'divided self', part drawn upwards by his `good angel' Solveig, part drawn downwards by the troll Temptress and the tyrant Mountain King. The `dark' side of Peer wins, he abandons his `good angel' and is transformed into a monster of hard-hearted egotism. We only infer the long Dream Stage of his tragic course from the fact that he has risen to a position of enormous wealth and power. In fact, after a long gap in the story of his life, we pick it up again at the point where he is entering the Frustration Stage, as he begins to feel a sense of inadequacy and meaninglessness in his self-centred existence. He thrashes around more and more wildly for new realms to conquer, new roles to play: all of which ends in nightmare, despair and the threat of imminent destruction.

But then, because his story is not Tragedy, and because his `good angel' is not one of the inadequate little rejected `Innocent Young Girls' of so many tragedies but a strong, mature and wise woman in her own right, Gynt is enabled at the last minute to rediscover his `light self' buried for so long beneath the outward monstrous shell of his egotism. He can move in the nick of time from the false centre of himself to his true centre. Like Raskolnikov redeemed by the love of Sonia, or Kay by Gerda, or the Beast by Beauty, he has been liberated to become himself. As he and Solveig embrace he is at last united with his missing `other half' to make him whole.

Up to now we have been looking at the main plots underlying stories as much as possible in separate compartments. It is certainly true that, on one level, most stories are primarily shaped by one type of plot more than another; that each