The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [524]
4. We have already seen another striking modern example in the `wise old man' Obi-Wan Kenobi and the beautiful Princess Leia, who play a key part in guiding the heroes on their journey in Star Wars.
5. Further variations on the Quest plot are those which shape two different types of stories inspired by the Second World War. On one hand are those which are a cross with the Overcoming the Monster plot, where a small group of men have to travel on a long, perilous journey to destroy some particularly sinister and menacing concentration of the enemy's dark power. Well-known examples of this include films like The Guns of Navarone (which we have already looked at as an Overcoming the Monster story); The Dirty Dozen, in which a bunch of violent misfits redeem themselves when they are recruited to be dropped into occupied France to knock out a closely-guarded chateau which is the centre of the German army's information network; or The Heroes of Telemark, where a group of commandos are dropped into occupied Norway to join the resistance in knocking out a heavy-water plant which could enable the Nazis to develop a war-winning nuclear bomb. On the other hand are those prison camp escape stories, such as The Wooden Horse, The Colditz Story or The Great Escape, where the story's driving force is the contrast between the intolerable constriction in which the heroes begin as prisoners of war and their dream of the all-important distant goal of `freedom. The chief emphasis here, of course, is on the difficulty of getting away on the journey in the first place. The planning and execution of the escape itself inevitably takes up much of the story. Once the journey begins this follows the usual pattern of ordeals and `thrilling escapes' alternating with periods of respite: and, again, one of the worst ordeals maybe that which takes place when the goal is at last in sight, on the frontier. The plot in such stories thus depends for its suspense on a cross between the archetypes of the Quest and the Thrilling Escape.
1. A century earlier Shakespeare had also set The Tempest on a kind of `desert island, although the whole point about Prospero's isle was that it was inhabited. Few islands in stories turn out to be totally uninhabited: the true `desert' (or `deserted') island is more often found in cartoons. Of course the hero's visit to an island with strange and terrifying inhabitants appears in literature as far back as Odysseus's visits to the islands of the Cyclops, Circe, Calypso and others.
2. Two other well-known eighteenth-century novels shaped by the Voyage and Return theme were published in 1759: Samuel Johnson's Rasselas and Voltaire's Candide. Both show their heroes sallying forth from the comparatively cosy surroundings in which they have lived all their lives, to investigate the perplexing horrors of life in the great world outside. However, in Rasselas, by a reversal of the usual pattern, the Abyssinian prince-hero actually begins in a kind of `never never land, a remote `happy valley' shut off from the outside world, where the inhabitants know no evil. Accompanied by that archetypal pair, a beautiful young Princess and a `wise old man, Imlac, Rasselas thus experiences the `normality' of our familiar outside world (greed, folly, violence, deprivation) as highly novel and abnormal, before returning home enlightened. Candide has an even more salutary set of experiences in the outside world, which so signally fails to bear out his tutor Dr Pangloss's vacuously optimistic maxim that `all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds', Finally he decides to settle down with his equivalents of a `Princess' and a `wise old man, Cunegonde and Dr Pangloss, to `cultivate his garden: Although he does not return geographically to where he started, the end of the story has the familiar Voyage and Return feel of a return to humdrum normality after a highly abnormal adventure.