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By Root 5358 0

Mr McGregor's garden he is exhausted, and has to be put to bed: but whether he is truly repentant of his folly - i.e., whether he has really learned anything from his experience and is not just a naughty child who might well do it all over again tomorrow - is not altogether clear. Both Candide and Rasselas emerge from their adventures considerably chastened by what they have learned about the follies of mankind in general. The Ancient Mariner has been so shocked by the consequences of his own folly, in shooting the albatross, that he is marked for life. While few stories where a hero returns home repenting of his own folly have been more familiar over the centuries than the parable of the Prodigal Son from St Luke's Gospel. The younger of two brothers, after demanding his share of their inheritance from his father, travels into `a far country' where he `wasted his substance with riotous living'. Following the Voyage and Return pattern, his dream then turns to nightmare. After he has lost all his money, a great famine arises. He is on the verge of starving to death. But in the nick of time, he manages to crawl back home, prepared to throw himself on his father's mercy, begging to be allowed to perform the most menial tasks in return for enough to eat. So unconditional is the father's love that, on seeing his son approaching, he joyfully welcomes him home with honour.

There are other versions of the Voyage and Return story where the hero's transformation, as it progressively unfolds, becomes the real underlying theme of the whole story. The cumulative purpose of the satire in Gulliver's Travels, for instance, as Gulliver makes his four successive journeys to Lilliput, Brobdignag, Laputa and the land of the Houyhnhnms, is to show the hero the real state of the supposedly civilised human beings he had left behind in a kind of Caliban's mirror, revealing their true nature as `the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl on the surface of the earth'. By the time he reaches the land of the Houyhnhnms, the wise, gentle, saintly horses who rule over the horrible, disorderly Yahoos (human beings seen in their `true light'), Gulliver has conceived an almost total distaste for humanity. When he finally reaches home for the last time, he has been so profoundly changed that he finds the very presence of humans abohorrent, and desires only the company of horses.

A rather more positive personal transformation is the fundamental theme of that near-contemporary novel, Robinson Crusoe. At the beginnining we see the hero as a thoughtless young man, rejecting the sage advice of his father and bent only on adventure (although even now the precedent of the Prodigal Son comes to his mind). Shocked to the core of his being by the ordeal he has to face when he finds himself cast away alone on the island, Crusoe eventually experiences feelings of profound repentance for his former frivolity. He comes to a belief in God who, despite the awful plight he finds himself in, has yet provided him with so many blessings, not least in sparing his life and providing him with so many vital necessities of life salvaged from the wreck. We see Crusoe gradually learning to become master of his little kingdom and of himself; so that by the time, in the second half of the story, he has to face the new ordeal of discovering that his island is the resort of a tribe of fearsome cannibals, his character has become strong enough to cope with it. By the end he is king over the island, a true leader over his little band of followers; and when he returns to England, the success of his inner transformation is outwardly symbolised by the discovery that an investment in land made long before has now matured. He is a prosperous man, able to settle down at last in that secure `middle station' in life recommended by his father all those years before.

A similar prolonged personal transformation is the theme of Apuleius's The Golden Ass. We first meet the hero as a happy-go-lucky young man whose only interests are sexual adventure and a vague