The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [4]
Firstly, why was this so? Why has the imagination of storytellers seemed to form so readily and regularly round this theme? Why do we recognise it as such a satisfactory shape to a story?
Secondly, were there other patterns like this underlying stories, shaping them in quite different ways? After all, this cycle of self-destruction only describes a certain type of story, with an `unhappy ending'. What about all those stories which have `happy endings'? Were there any similar basic patterns underlying these too?
As soon as I began to look at stories in this light, a number of other possible basic plots began to suggest themselves. There were, for instance, all those stories about the overcoming of a'monster', like jaws or Beowulf, in which our interest centres on the threat posed by some monstrous figure of evil, who is then challenged by the hero and finally, after a climactic battle, killed. There were `rags to riches' stories, like The Ugly Duckling or Cinderella, where our main interest lies in seeing some initially humble and disregarded little hero or heroine being raised up to a position of immense success and splendour. There were stories based on the theme of a great quest, like the Odyssey or The Lord of the Rings, where our interest centres on the hero's long, difficult journey towards some distant, enormously important goal.
I embarked on an almost indiscriminate course of reading and re-reading, through hundreds of stories of all kinds (soon recognising how little most of us actually remember in detail even about stories we think we know quite well). And it was not long before I began to make a startling discovery. Not only did it indeed seem to be true that there were a number of basic themes or plots which continually recurred in the storytelling of mankind, shaping tales of very different types and from almost every age and culture. Even more surprising was the degree of detail to which these `basic plots' seemed to shape the stories they had inspired; so that one might find, for instance, a well-known nineteenth-century novel constructed in almost exactly the same way as a Middle Eastern folk tale dating from 1200 years before; or a popular modern children's story revealing remarkable hidden parallels with the structure of an epic poem composed in ancient Greece.
As one `basic plot' after another emerged to view, each with its own particular structure, I eventually found myself with just one intractable pile of stories which did not seem to fit any of the patterns I had been looking at. I puzzled over them for some time. They seemed to be completely diverse: several were classic children's stories, like Peter Rabbit, Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland; there were a long list of novels, from Robinson Crusoe to Brideshead Revisited; there were science fiction stories, like H. G. Wells's The Time Machine; there were films ranging from The Third Man and The Wizard of Oz to Gone With The Wind. Then the penny dropped that all these stories were in fact shaped by the same basic plot, one I had not even considered before (that which I have called `Voyage and Return'). And at this point I found myself brought up against the possibility which is the basis of this book. Although I had long been familiar with that old teasing notion that there are only a handful of basic plots to stories, I had never taken it any more seriously than most people. I was now having to accept