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By Root 5371 0

make so many mistakes on their journey - invariably through some selfish act of folly, recklessness or greed - that by the time he arrives back in Ithaca only he himself is left alive. Christian and Faithful in Pilgrim's Progress fail to recognise the true nature of Vanity Fair, with the result that Faithful is killed and Christian only narrowly escapes with his life. Aeneas for a long time all but abandons his great task of finding a new homeland when he is bewitched by his love for Dido, and eventually has to be sternly recalled to his quest by Jupiter, the king of the gods. The rabbits in Watership Down make a near-fatal mistake when they fail to recognise the true nature of the strange warren in which they consider settling down: it is only in the nick of time that they are saved by Fiver's intuitive understanding that it is a place of death. Jason's Argonauts, the children of Israel, many of the knights on the Grail Quest, are similarly led into catastrophic misjudgements on their journeys, always by some appeal to their egocentric appetites, some failure to `see whole'. And one of the most important elements in the transformation which allows the hero and those who survive eventually to succeed in a Quest is that they gradually learn from their mistakes, and arrive at a state where they no longer make them.

In general, therefore, although the earlier types of plot show the dark forces which stand between the hero or heroine and the goal as being centred essentially outside them, nevertheless the more they themselves show the weakness and limited awareness of immaturity, the more likely they are to fall prey to the dark power. And of course we are now moving towards those types of story where it is made much more obvious that the dark forces the hero or heroine are having to contend with in fact lie within themselves.

The maturing experience

As in the three earlier plots, the Voyage and Return story in its fullest expression is about the maturing process. But where it differs from the earlier plots lies in how it presents the transformation which the hero or heroine must go through if they are going to reach the goal. When we first meet them they are usually young and just on the verge of adult life, like Lucius in The Golden Ass, or Robinson Crusoe or the Ancient Mariner at the start of his fateful voyage. They are immature, feckless and self-centred, and this, directly or indirectly, is why they stumble in the first place into that new world which is so strange to them. They do not fully understand what they are doing or what is happening to them, which is why they become trapped in the shadow of the dark figures they meet in the other world, who eventually threaten them with destruction. What enables them eventually to escape from their thrall to the dark power is that they develop a wholly new understanding. They `see the light' in a way which transforms their attitude; and it is this which eventually allows them to escape from the dark power and to return to the world where they began. But so changed have they been by their encounter with the unknown that their relationship to it is quite different. They have escaped from their original state of limited consciousness and learned to `see whole'. They have discovered who they are. They have grown up.

We even see all this embryonically reflected in the children's tale of Peter Rabbit, who begins as a feckless, rebellious little child, which is what lands him in the appalling plight of being chased round the garden by Mr McGregor. Eventually, in the familiar nightmare climax, Peter finds himself completely trapped, without a clue as to what to do next. No one else can help him, he is completely on his own. But then he jumps up on a wheelbarrow from which, for the first time, he can see the whole garden. He has moved literally to a higher level of consciousness, which enables him to `see whole'. It is this which, by showing him how to reach the gate of the garden without having to pass Mr McGregor, allows him to escape with his life from what had seemed certain