The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [199]
The central key to the story thus lies, in each case, in the struggle between the young hero and a fully-grown man who, as a Dark Father-figure or Tyrant, is a negative version of the father absent at the beginning. And when, after a long period of struggle, the hero at last comes to the end of his adventures, what happens? In each case the hero finally manages to overthrow this dark figure: Aladdin kills the Sorcerer; Perseus kills Polydectes; Theseus kills Minos's terrible representative, the Minotaur, Jack kills the giant. And we then see Aladdin, having at last grown up into a fully mature man, fully united with the Princess he has liberated and succeeding to her father's kingdom. Perseus and Theseus have likewise liberated their Princesses from the shadow of the dark power and succeeded to their kingdoms. Jack has won the Giant's treasures and, even though he returns at the end to live with mother (which merely shows that this is a version of the story intended to be told to very young children) we no longer see him as the idle, good-for-nothing, dependent boy he was at the beginning, but as an independent, powerful young man in his own right, who has redeemed his father's lost inheritance, won a great treasure and is now capable of protecting and looking after his mother.
In each case we have seen a young boy whose most conspicuous lack was a strong, loving father. He has then been confronted with the negative version of this, a powerful but egocentric, unloving male authority-figure. And at the end, having killed off this figure, he has himself been transformed into a light and positive version of the figure he has overthrown. The hero has become a powerful, independent, fully-grown man, but at the same time - unlike his dark antagonist - he is whole, both strong and loving.
In the stories of Cinderella and Snow White, where the heroine is the central figure, once they have lost their true, loving mothers, we see the familiar pattern in the arrival of the wicked stepmother, cruel, treacherous and vain, who then becomes the chief dark figure of the story. Again, as a fully-grown woman, mother or queen, she represents the negative, unloving, egocentric version of what the heroine herself is eventually destined to grow up into. When, at the end, the heroine has been through her long maturing transformation and is finally liberated from the grip of the dark power by the Prince, she has at last become a perfect potential mother and queen in her own right, fit to succeed alongside her prince to rule over the kingdom.
In all these stories the chief dark figure thus signals to us the shadowy, negative version of precisely what the hero or heroine will eventually have to make fully positive in themselves. In fact, as we shall see, this principle whereby the nature of the dark figures gives us a direct, unconscious clue as to what needs to be transformed into its positive, light version for the story to reach a happy ending applies in stories of every kind. It is the key to the function played by the dark figure throughout storytelling. And once we learn to recognise how subtly and consistently this principle works, the drama which lies at the heart of storytelling opens up in a remarkable new way.
The archetypal family drama
There are few themes more familiar to stories than that which traces the growing up of a little hero or heroine from immature, dependent childhood to some ultimate state of independent