 | |
| Author | Christopher Booker |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Published | 2004 |
| Pages | 736 |
| ISBN | 978-0826452092 |
| OCLC | 57641576 |
| 809/.924 | |
| LC Class | PN3378 .B65 2004 |
| Preceded by | The Great Deception |
| Followed by | Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming |
The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories is a 2004 book by Christopher Booker containing a Jung-influenced analysis of stories and their psychological meaning. Booker worked on the book for 34 years. [1]
The meta-plot begins with the anticipation stage, in which the hero is called to the adventure to come. This is followed by a dream stage, in which the adventure begins, the hero has some success, and has an illusion of invincibility. However, this is then followed by a frustration stage, in which the hero has his first confrontation with the enemy, and the illusion of invincibility is lost. This worsens in the nightmare stage, which is the climax of the plot, where hope is apparently lost. Finally, in the resolution, the hero overcomes his burden against the odds.
The key thesis of the book: "However many characters may appear in a story, its real concern is with just one: its hero. It is the one whose fate we identify with, as we see them gradually developing towards that state of self-realization which marks the end of the story. Ultimately it is in relation to this central figure that all other characters in a story take on their significance. What each of the other characters represents is really only some aspect of the inner state of the hero himself."
The protagonist sets out to defeat an antagonistic force (often evil) that threatens the protagonist and/or protagonist's homeland.
Perseus, Theseus, Beowulf (anonymous), Dracula (Bram Stoker), The War of the Worlds (H.G. Wells), Nicholas Nickleby (Charles Dickens), The Guns of Navarone (Alistair McLean), Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven , James Bond (Ian Fleming), Jaws , Star Wars: A New Hope , Naruto , Harry Potter (J.K. Rowling)
The poor protagonist acquires power, wealth, and/or a mate, loses it all and gains it back, growing as a person as a result.
Cinderella, Aladdin, Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë), A Little Princess (Frances Hodgson Burnett), Great Expectations (Charles Dickens), David Copperfield (Charles Dickens), Moll Flanders (Daniel Defoe), The Red and the Black (Stendhal), The Prince and the Pauper (Mark Twain), "The Ugly Duckling" (Hans Christian Andersen), The Gold Rush , The Jerk .
The protagonist and companions set out to acquire an important object or to get to a location. They face temptations and other obstacles along the way.
The Iliad (Homer), The Pilgrim's Progress (John Bunyan), The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien), King Solomon's Mines (H. Rider Haggard), The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri), Watership Down (Richard Adams), The Aeneid (Virgil), Raiders of the Lost Ark , Monty Python and the Holy Grail .
The protagonist goes to a strange land and, after overcoming the threats it poses or learning important lessons unique to that location, returns with experience.
Ramayana , Odyssey (Homer), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll), "Goldilocks and the Three Bears", Orpheus, The Time Machine (H.G. Wells), Peter Rabbit (Beatrix Potter), The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien), Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh), "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (Samuel Taylor Coleridge), Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell), The Third Man , The Lion King , Back to the Future , The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis), Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift), Peter Pan (J. M. Barrie), The Epic of Gilgamesh .
Light and humorous character with a happy or cheerful ending; a dramatic work in which the central motif is the triumph over adverse circumstance, resulting in a successful or happy conclusion. [2] Booker stresses that comedy is more than humor. It refers to a pattern where the conflict becomes more and more confusing, but is at last made plain in a single clarifying event. The majority of romance films fall into this category.
The Wasps (Aristophanes), Aulularia (Titus Maccius Plautus), The Arbitration (Menander), A Midsummer Night's Dream (William Shakespeare), Much Ado About Nothing (William Shakespeare), Twelfth Night (William Shakespeare), The Taming of the Shrew (William Shakespeare), The Alchemist (Ben Jonson), Bridget Jones's Diary (Helen Fielding), Four Weddings and a Funeral , The Big Lebowski .
The protagonist is a hero with a major character flaw or great mistake which is ultimately their undoing. The protagonist's unfortunate end evokes pity at their folly and the fall of a fundamentally good character.
Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy), Bonnie and Clyde , Carmen (Prosper Mérimée), Citizen Kane , John Dillinger, Jules et Jim , Julius Caesar (William Shakespeare), Macbeth (William Shakespeare), Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert), Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde), Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare), Hamilton , The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), Hamlet (William Shakespeare).
An event forces the protagonist to change their ways, and often become a better person.
Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky), "The Frog Prince", "Beauty and the Beast", "The Snow Queen" (Hans Christian Andersen), A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens), The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett), Peer Gynt (Henrik Ibsen), Groundhog Day .
The third event in a series of events becomes "the final trigger for something important to happen." This pattern appears in childhood stories such as "Goldilocks and the Three Bears", "Cinderella", and "Little Red Riding Hood".
In adult stories, the Rule of Three conveys the gradual resolution of a process that leads to transformation. This transformation can be downwards as well as upwards.
Booker asserts that the Rule of Three is expressed in four ways[ citation needed ]:
The Seven Basic Plots has received mixed responses from scholars and journalists.
Some have celebrated the book's audacity and breadth; for example, the author and essayist Fay Weldon wrote the following: "This is the most extraordinary, exhilarating book. It always seemed to me that 'the story' was God's way of giving meaning to crude creation. Booker now interprets the mind of God, and analyzes not just the novel – which will never to me be quite the same again – but puts the narrative of contemporary human affairs into a new perspective. If it took its author a lifetime to write, one can only feel gratitude that he did it." [5] Beryl Bainbridge, Richard Adams, Ronald Harwood, and John Bayley also spoke positively of the work, while philosopher Roger Scruton described it as a "brilliant summary of story-telling". [6]
Others have dismissed the book on grounds that Booker is too rigid in fitting works of art to the plot types above. For example, novelist and literary critic Adam Mars-Jones wrote, "[Booker] sets up criteria for art, and ends up condemning Rigoletto , The Cherry Orchard , Wagner, Proust, Joyce, Kafka and Lawrence—the list goes on—while praising Crocodile Dundee , E.T. and Terminator 2 ". [7] Similarly, Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times writes, "Mr. Booker evaluates works of art on the basis of how closely they adhere to the archetypes he has so laboriously described; the ones that deviate from those classic patterns are dismissed as flawed or perverse – symptoms of what has gone wrong with modern art and the modern world." [8]
A protagonist is the main character of a story. The protagonist makes key decisions that affect the plot, primarily influencing the story and propelling it forward, and is often the character who faces the most significant obstacles. If a story contains a subplot, or is a narrative made up of several stories, then each subplot may have its own protagonist.
A cliffhanger or cliffhanger ending is a plot device in fiction which features a main character in a precarious situation, facing a difficult dilemma or confronted with a shocking revelation at the end of an episode of serialized fiction or before a commercial break in a television programme. A cliffhanger is intended to incentivize the audience to return to see how the characters resolve the dilemma.
In a literary work, film, or other narrative, the plot is the sequence of events in which each event affects the next one through the principle of cause-and-effect. The causal events of a plot can be thought of as a series of events linked by the connector "and so". Plots can vary from the simple—such as in a traditional ballad—to forming complex interwoven structures, with each part sometimes referred to as a subplot or imbroglio.
In fiction, a character or personage, is a person or other being in a narrative. The character may be entirely fictional or based on a real-life person, in which case the distinction of a "fictional" versus "real" character may be made. Derived from the Ancient Greek word χαρακτήρ, the English word dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones by Henry Fielding in 1749. From this, the sense of "a part played by an actor" developed. Character, particularly when enacted by an actor in the theater or cinema, involves "the illusion of being a human person". In literature, characters guide readers through their stories, helping them to understand plots and ponder themes. Since the end of the 18th century, the phrase "in character" has been used to describe an effective impersonation by an actor. Since the 19th century, the art of creating characters, as practiced by actors or writers, has been called characterization.
A story within a story, also referred to as an embedded narrative, is a literary device in which a character within a story becomes the narrator of a second story. Multiple layers of stories within stories are sometimes called nested stories. A play may have a brief play within it, such as in Shakespeare's play Hamlet; a film may show the characters watching a short film; or a novel may contain a short story within the novel. A story within a story can be used in all types of narration including poems, and songs.
A plot device or plot mechanism is any technique in a narrative used to move the plot forward.
A villain is a stock character, whether based on a historical narrative or one of literary fiction. Random House Unabridged Dictionary defines such a character as "a cruelly malicious person who is involved in or devoted to wickedness or crime; scoundrel; or a character in a play, novel, or the like, who constitutes an important evil agency in the plot". The antonym of a villain is a hero.
In any narrative, a foil is a character who contrasts with another character, typically, a character who contrasts with the protagonist, in order to better highlight or differentiate certain qualities of the protagonist. A foil to the protagonist may also be the antagonist of the plot.
Story structure or narrative structure is the recognizable or comprehensible way in which a narrative's different elements are unified, including in a particularly chosen order and sometimes specifically referring to the ordering of the plot: the narrative series of events, though this can vary based on culture. In a play or work of theatre especially, this can be called dramatic structure, which is presented in audiovisual form. Story structure can vary by culture and by location. The following is an overview of various story structures and components that might be considered.
Traditionally, conflict is a major element of narrative or dramatic structure that creates challenges in a story by adding uncertainty as to whether the goal will be achieved. In works of narrative, conflict is the challenge main characters need to solve to achieve their goals. However, narrative is not limited to a single conflict. In narrative, the term resolution refers to the closure or conclusion of the conflict, which may or may not occur by the story's end.
Anne Tyler is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published twenty-four novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Breathing Lessons won the prize in 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and Redhead By the Side of the Road was longlisted for the same award in 2020.
Prince Charming is a fairy tale stock character who comes to the rescue of a damsel in distress and must engage in a quest to liberate her from an evil spell. This classification suits most heroes of a number of traditional folk tales, including "Snow White", "Sleeping Beauty", "Rapunzel" and "Cinderella", even if in the original story they were given another name, or no name at all.
A film adaptation is the transfer of a work or story, in whole or in part, to a feature film. Although often considered a type of derivative work, film adaptation has been conceptualized recently by academic scholars such as Robert Stam as a dialogic process.
"Goldilocks and the Three Bears" is a 19th-century English fairy tale of which three versions exist. The original version of the tale tells of an impudent old woman who enters the forest home of three anthropomorphic bachelor bears while they are away. She eats some of their porridge, sits down on one of their chairs, breaks it, and sleeps in one of their beds. When the bears return and discover her, she wakes up, jumps out of the window, and is never seen again. The second version replaces the old woman with a young, naive, blonde-haired girl named Goldilocks, and the third and by far best-known version replaces the bachelor trio with a family of three. The story has elicited various interpretations and has been adapted to film, opera, and other media. "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" is one of the most popular fairy tales in the English language.
The rule of three is a writing principle which suggests that a trio of entities such as events or characters is more humorous, satisfying, or effective than other numbers. The audience of this form of text is also thereby more likely to remember the information conveyed because having three entities combines both brevity and rhythm with having the smallest amount of information to create a pattern.
Revolting Rhymes is a 1982 poetry collection by British author Roald Dahl. Originally published under the title Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes, it is a parody of traditional folk tales in verse, where Dahl gives a re-interpretation of six well-known fairy tales, featuring surprise endings in place of the traditional happily-ever-after finishes.
Politically Correct Bedtime Stories: Modern Tales for Our Life and Times is a 1994 book written by American writer James Finn Garner, in which Garner satirizes the trend toward political correctness and censorship of children's literature, with an emphasis on humour and parody. The bulk of the book consists of fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood, the Three Little Pigs and Snow White, rewritten so that they represent what a politically correct adult would consider a good and moral tale for children.
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon is a non-fiction book by American author David Grann. Published in 2009, the book recounts the activities of the British explorer Percy Fawcett who, in 1925, disappeared with his son in the Amazon rainforest while looking for the ancient "Lost City of Z". In the book, Grann recounts his own journey into the Amazon, by which he discovered new evidence about how Fawcett may have died.
Grimmtastic Girls is a series of children's books written by Joan Holub and Suzanne Williams and published between 2014 and 2016 with Scholastic Inc. The characters are based on those from nursery rhymes and fairy tales, including Grimm's Fairytales. Each book is told from the perspective of a different character, including Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Goldilocks. The series takes place at the boarding school Grimm Academy, located in the country of Grimmlandia, where certain girls are chosen by magic charms and must deal with middle school while thwarting the E.V.I.L. Society's plans.