The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [219]
More obviously standing in the position of Alter-Ego to the hero, however, are those recognisable individuals who are much closer to him and here, as we saw, the relationship may take three forms. Firstly there is the close friend or ally who is not otherwise distinguished - David's Jonathan, Christian's Faithful, Hamlet's Horatio - except that he is a faithful, honourable companion. Secondly there is the Alter-Ego or ally who differs from the hero, often by displaying qualities compensatory to those of the hero himself. This figure may be presented as in some way `inferior' to the hero (e.g., as a servant, like Man Friday), but in other ways he may well have attributes which the hero himself lacks and which are of vital assistance: e.g., Sancho Panza, Jeeves, Figaro in The Barber of Seville. Thirdly there are those instances where the hero has several companions who between them make up a whole. Sometimes these may simply be echoes of the hero, like D'Artagnan's three musketeers, or Sir Galahad's two fellow-knights, Percival and Bors, who accompany him in the closing stages of the Grail Quest. Sometimes they are carefully differentiated, so that each companion individually contributes to an overall balance of qualities which will be necessary for ultimate success; as in Watership Down or King Solomon's Mines, where in each case the hero is a protective leader, but has around him a tightly-knit team including one figure who represents physical strength, another who represents mental calculation and planning skills and a third who represents intuitive understanding, the power to see hidden realities beyond the immediate situation.
The real point of these allies, in all their different forms, is that they act to reinforce the hero's own powers and qualities. Their role in the story is to act as extensions of the hero himself.
The Child
Thus do the chief light figures in stories correspond to the four central roles in the archetypal drama: Father, Mother, Hero/Heroine and `Other Half'. There is one other light figure who occasionally appears to make the family drama complete. Since, on an instinctive level, the ultimate purpose of this process is that the hero should be united with the heroine to form a new centre of wholeness for the regeneration of life, then the final confirmation that the chain of life is to continue into the future is the birth of a child. At this stage of the drama the hero himself is transformed into a father, with a whole new focus for his love and protective feelings in the little defenceless being he has called into the world and who commands a new complex of instinctual responses. And as we have seen, in a certain type of story, the Child plays a numinous role, not just as the promise of new life but as a redeeming figure, capable of awakening the dormant inner feminine of a dark hero. This is the archetypal figure whom Jung called the puer aeternus, the eternal Child.'
Particularly where the hero is an older man, the Child can play much the same redeeming role in awakening his heart and soul as the anima-figure. The dried-up old miser Scrooge is brought alive and awakened to his inner feminine by the moving vision of the little crippled Tiny Tim. Silas Marner is similarly liberated from his narrow egocentric prison by the arrival of the little golden-haired child Eppie who, as she grows up into a young woman, gradually evolves from the role of Child to anima-figure. Perdita, the figure of redemption in The Winter's Tale, goes through a similar transformation, reflecting the steadily