The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [20]
Such is the nature of the figure against whom the hero is pitted, in a battle to the death. And we never have any doubt as to why the hero stands in opposition to such a centre of dark and destructive power: because the hero's own motivation and qualities are presented as so completely in contrast to those ascribed to the monster. We see the hero being drawn into the struggle not just on his own behalf but to save others: to save all those who are suffering in the monster's shadow; to free the community or the kingdom the monster is threatening; to liberate the `Princess' it has imprisoned. The hero is always shown as acting selflessly and in some higher cause, in a way which shows him standing at the opposite pole to the monster's egocentricity.
And even though the monster wields such terrifying power that, almost to the end, its dark presence is the dominant factor holding sway over the world described by the story, it has one weakness which ultimately renders it vulnerable. Despite its cunning, its awareness of the reality of the world around it is in some important respect limited. Seeing the world through tunnel vision, shaped by its egocentric desires, there is always something which the monster cannot see and is likely to overlook. That is why, by the true hero, the monster can always in the end be outwitted: as was the mighty Goliath by little David, who was able to stay out of reach of the giant's strength by using his little slingstones; as was the Medusa by Perseus with his reflecting shield, which meant he did not have to look at her directly; as was Minos by his own daughter secretly presenting Theseus with the sword and thread; as were Wells's Martians by their overlooking even something as apparently insignificant as the destructive power of bacteria. It is this fatal flaw in the monster's awareness which is ultimately its undoing. Despite its power, the monster is shown not only as heartless and egocentric. It is also, in some crucial respect which turns the day, blind.
This shadowy figure is of the greatest significance in stories, not just because of the more obvious and lurid appearances it makes in myths, folk tales, horror stories and science fiction, but because to a greater or lesser extent these characteristics describe the dark, negative and villainous characters who appear in stories of almost every kind.
Indeed, once we have identified the monster's essential attributes, we can see how there are a great many types of story shaped by the Overcoming the Monster plot other than just the more literal examples we have so far been looking at.
Melodrama
There were, for instance, many of those melodramatic tales beloved of the nineteenth century which maybe caricatured as `the hero having to rescue the beautiful maiden from the clutches of the wicked Sir Jasper.1 A familiar instance is Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839). Like the hero of many a fairy tale, young Nicholas is left orphaned by the death of his father and having to provide for his penniless mother and sister. He is taken in hand by a seemingly kindly uncle, Ralph, who arranges a teaching post for him at the grim Northern school, Dotheboys Hall. And when we meet the tyrannical owner of this establishment, Mr Squeers (who, like Polyphemus, `had but one eye, and popular prejudice runs in favour of two'), we might think we had met the story's chief `monster'. But no sooner has Nicholas overcome this particular villain, by giving him a thrashing and escaping from the school, than it gradually emerges that the hero and his family are in fact threatened by a kind of mysterious, Hydra-headed conspiracy, of which Squeers had merely been one lesser `head.
In fact the chief monster at the centre of this web of evil is the wicked usurer, Uncle Ralph himself. The action centres first on the liberation of Nicholas's