The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [57]
The life-renewing goal
Thus does the great Quest come to an end, and we then we see perhaps the most surprising thing of all about this type of story, The heroes of all these very dissimilar tales have in fact arrived, by remarkably similar stages, at a remarkably similar goal. Odysseus has regained his Queen and his kingdom. Aeneas has won his Princess and his kingdom. Jason has won his Princess and, through her, succeeds to the kingdom of Corinth (the Golden Fleece itself by this time having come to be seen as purely symbolic of the `treasure' that has been won). The Jews have won and established their new kingdom. The Grail heroes carry their great treasure, the golden Grail, to the city of Sarras, where Galahad becomes king, succeeding an evil tyrant, and is then received into the kingdom of heaven. Allan Quatermain and his friends, having established Umbopa as the rightful king over the lost and now found land of Solomon, in place of an evil tyrant, return home with their fabulous treasure. The rabbits of Watership Down, united with their `princesses, have established their new kingdom - to the point where, in the closing pages, their `King' Hazel can look round at a new generation of young rabbits playing in the sun, knowing that the future is assured. He is then called by a mysterious stranger, whose ears shine in the darkness of the burrow with `a faint silver light, off to a rabbit heaven.
Of the Quests we have looked at in any detail, the only one which might not seem to follow this pattern is Pilgrim's Progress. But even Christian meets his most nearly fatal ordeal on the very edge of his goal, when he nearly drowns, amid hideous visions of `hobgoblins and evil spirits', in the deep, dark river which surrounds the hill on which the Celestial City stands - and is then received to the sound of trumpets into the kingdom of heaven. And as if Bunyan subconsciously realised that, to make his story complete, Christian should there be united with a `Princess, he promptly set about writing the second, much less well-known part of his tale, which tells of how his hero's wife Christiana makes her own long and hazardous journey to join him.
The real point about the ending of all these stories is that in essence it is so familiar. The real goal of the Quest emerges as remarkably similar to that happy ending we have seen in our previous types of story: the final coming together of hero and heroine, man and woman, and the succession to, or establishing of a kingdom. In each case it is this, in part or whole, which enables the Quest to end on an image of completion. And in each case what this also conveys to us is the sense that life, which in the opening stages of the story seemed so threatened, has in some profound sense been renewed. Odysseus has redemeed and brought his kingdom back to life, after the long, sterile years of the suitors' tyranny. Aeneas's city of Troy is dead: but on the Tiber it lives again, as new Rome, and will do so far into the glorious future. Jason returns home to redeem lolcos from the sterile tyranny of his step-father King Pelias, and then sets up his own new dynasty in Corinth. As the Jews toiled across the dead wilderness there was no more regular promise of the new life that was to come than Moses' repeated striking of `living waters' out of the rock: and from the years of harsh slavery in Egypt, where their sons, the promise of new life, had routinely been murdered, they are at last set free in the lush land `flowing with milk and honey, where life abounds and is assured for the future.
And so on, with the Grail Quest, Pilgrim's Progress, King Solomon's Mines, Watership Down. In each case the story ends on a great renewal of life, centred on a new secure base, guaranteed into the future. And we can see at last (although it was by no means clear while the story was still unfolding) that this was what the Quest had really been about all along.
The Quest: Summing