The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [49]
The hero's companions
We can say `the hero and his companions' because a distinctive mark of the Quest is the extent to which, more than in any other kind of story, the hero is not alone in his adventures. The story does ultimately centre round the single figure of the hero. But more consistently than in any other type of story, we are also made aware of the presence and importance of the friends who accompany him.
In fact the relationship of the hero to his companions assumes one of four general forms: and since these basic types of relationship are also found, more sporadically, through stories of all kinds, they must be noted.
Firstly, the hero's companions may simply be a large number of undifferentiated appendages, few if any of whom we even know by name. Such are the twelve boatloads of men who set out from Troy with Odysseus, Aeneas's Trojans or the main body of the Jews who accompany Moses.
Secondly, the hero may have an alter-ego who has no real distinguishing mark except his fidelity. Christian, for instance, has Faithful; Aeneas's close friend is `fidus Achates'; Frodo in The Lord of The Rings has the `faithful Sam Gamgee'2 (another instance of this relationship in a quite different type of story is Hamlet's with his `faithful Horatio').
Thirdly, the hero may have a subtler type of alter-ego whose role is to serve as a foil, displaying qualities the opposite of those shown by the hero. In the story of the Jewish exodus, for instance, Moses is shadowed in this way by his brother Aaron. Whenever Moses is being particularly faithful to his commission to lead the Jews into the Promised Land (as when he is up on Mount Sinai, receiving the ten commandments), Aaron is likely to be embodying infidelity and disloyalty (as in inciting the Jews to worship the Golden Calf). When the hero in the Epic of Gilgamesh sets out to slay the giant Humbaba, he takes with him his friend Enkidu; whenever Gilgamesh expresses courage and confidence, it is Enkidu who expresses the opposite emotions, fear and doubt. Equally, whenever the hero is in negative mode, it may be the alter-ego's role to be positive: as when Christian is overcome with suicidal despair in the dungeons of Doubting Castle, and has to be reassured by Faithful's successor as his companion, Hopeful. This kind of relationship where the chief companion embodies compensatory qualities missing in the hero (though often in an `inferior' or not fully-developed way) is of enormous importance in stories, and we shall come across many other examples: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Lear and the Fool, Don Giovanni and Leporello, Wooster and Jeeves, to name but a few.
Fourthly, in the most fully-differentiated form of the relationship between the Quest hero and his companions, the latter are each given distinct characteristics which complement each other, and add up to a 'whole'. In Watership Down, for instance, the hero and leader of the rabbits is Hazel. But he relies heavily on the physical strength of Bigwig, the rational planning capacities of Blackberry and the intuitive powers of Fiver; and without all their separate contributions combined, the Quest could not succeed. A strikingly similar balance can be seen in the group who set out on the Quest in King Solomon's Mines. Their leader and the story's hero is Allan Quatermain: his companions are the `bull-like' Sir Henry Curtis, representing physical strength; the immaculate Captain Good, who represents