The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [169]
(3) The `contrasting' or `double-negative three, where the first two are inadequate or wrong (essentially in the same way) and only the third one works or succeeds. We see an element of this in the three little pigs, two of whom get eaten, although it is most commonly seen in folk tales where the hero or heroine is the third child, contrasted with two identical others, usually older, who are dark. Cinderella's two `ugly sisters' are as alike as identical twins. They are there merely to present a double-negative to Cinderella's positive, as do the heroine's two sisters in Beauty and the Beast.
(4) The final form of three, the one capable of the most sophisticated development, is what may be called the `dialectical three' where, as we see reflected in Goldilocks, the first is wrong in one way, the second in another or opposite way, and only the third, in the middle, is just right. This idea that the way forward lies in finding an exact middle path between opposites is of extraordinary importance in storytelling and, as we shall see, some of the ways in which it finds expression are of breathtaking subtlety.
So far in this introduction to the role of numbers in stories we have focused on those simple childhood tales where the `rule of three' is obvious. But in earlier chapters we have already caught glimpses of how this rule plays the same function, rather less blatantly, in more sophisticated types of story. We saw how often in Quest stories, for instance, the hero has to face three final ordeals before he can secure his goal: as in the three tests imposed on Jason before he can win the Golden Fleece; or the three battles faced by Aeneas before he can marry the Princess and safely establish his new kingdom; or the three ordeals faced by Allan Quatermain and his friends in King Solomon's Mines before they can overthrow the Tyrant Twala and the Witch Gagool to secure the treasure. In King Lear, as in a folk tale, we see Cordelia as the third, light daughter, contrasted with the double-negative of her two dark, scheming sisters. In A Christmas Carol we see the character of Scrooge in his dark state initially defined by three acts of antisocial heartlessness; these trigger off the three successive nightmares centred on the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future which eventually trigger off his rebirth; and this is confirmed when, in his reborn, light self, he finally reverses each of the acts of rejection with which the story began.
Once we become aware of the archetypal significance of three in storytelling, we can see it everywhere, expressed in all sorts of different ways, large and small. It is something so fundamental to the way the human imagination works, that it often appears in ways of which not even the storyteller may have been conscious. It seems, for instance, quite natural that when Aladdin gets trapped in the cave after retrieving the lamp, he should be stuck there for three days. It seems the right number to convey the process of him gradually losing all hope until, when the third day is up, he at last despairingly rubs the ring on his finger and is confronted by the genie who releases him. It seems equally natural that when Charlotte Bronte describes Jane Eyre running away across the moors after her aborted wedding, she should have shown her heroine wandering distractedly for three days until she finally becomes so desperate that she throws herself on a doorstep to die. Only then is she discovered by St John Rivers and taken in to be restored to life.
The real point of this emphasis on three is the way it conveys to us, by a kind of symbolic shorthand, just how tortuous and difficult is the process whereby the hero or heroine is working towards their ultimate goal; and how there is only one, correct way for them to thread the path which will eventually lead them to their prize.
Indeed one of the more obvious ways in which this can be presented