Overcoming the Monster (Booker)

Definition

Overcoming the Monster is the first of the seven plots in Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots (2004), and the one he treats as the most basic. It is a plot, not an archetype and not a character: the name describes how a whole story moves. A community, a country or a single person lives under a mortal threat from a monstrous power, a beast, a giant, a tyrant or an invading force. The hero goes out to meet it, enjoys some early success, then feels its full strength and is driven to a final ordeal in which death seems certain. At the last moment comes an escape from death, the monster is destroyed, and the hero wins what it had held: a treasure, a kingdom, a princess.

Booker lays the plot out in five named stages: an Anticipation Stage with its call to action, a Dream Stage of initial success, a Frustration Stage when the monster shows its power, a Nightmare Stage of final ordeal, and the thrilling escape from death with the death of the monster. He reads the shape through Jung. His monster is egocentric power in a body: possessive, devouring, blind to everything but its own wants, which is why there is always something it cannot see. The hero is its positive counterpart, and the rescued princess, Andromeda in the Perseus story, stands for the hero’s anima. The plot therefore pictures, for Booker, a self freeing itself from the grip of the ego. That reading is his frame, not a finding.

History

The plot is introduced before it is named. Booker opens the book on Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and the Old English Beowulf, two stories of a predator terrorising a small community until a hero goes out to kill it, and asks whether Peter Benchley, who wrote the novel behind the film, had been influenced by the poem. His answer, that the shape must have emerged spontaneously from the novelist’s own imagination, is the first statement of the book’s thesis.

Two chapters of Part One, “The Seven Gateways to the Underworld”, then set out the plot. Chapter 1 works through the oldest cases: the forest monster Humbaba in the Epic of Gilgamesh (p. 21), Little Red Riding Hood (p. 22), Perseus, who must overcome two monsters and wins Andromeda (read as anima, pp. 24, 28), Theseus and the Minotaur, and Beowulf’s fights with Grendel, Grendel’s mother and the dragon (p. 25), before carrying the plot forward to Stoker’s Dracula (pp. 27–28). Chapter 2, “The Monster (II) and the Thrilling Escape from Death”, follows it into modern fiction and film: Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby with the one-eyed schoolmaster Squeers (p. 34), The Magnificent Seven and its source in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (pp. 35–36), The Guns of Navarone (p. 35), Fleming’s Dr No, first met in chapter 1 and then taken stage by stage (pp. 21–22, 38–39), Wells’s The War of the Worlds (p. 39), which Booker grants is not strictly an Overcoming the Monster story because its hero plays no part in routing the Martians, and, as a last example, Star Wars (1977; pp. 42–45). The page numbers are those of the paperback reprint, checked in the full text.

Booker says he drew the pattern from the stories themselves and its meaning from Jung. The examples hold up as a set; the reading does not follow from them. Kasia Boddy (2004) pointed out that influence explains much of what Booker credits to the unconscious: Ian Fleming need not have tapped the collective unconscious if he had simply read many of the same books as Booker.

The debate

The first question is what kind of thing the plot is. In the void it sits nearest the hero and the shadow, but it is neither. Jung’s hero is an archetypal figure and his shadow the unacknowledged side of the personality; Booker’s plot is a sequence of stages with a cast of roles. Booker’s monster is also not Jung’s shadow. It is an outward figure for the ego-driven “dark power” he finds behind every plot, and he reserves the inward version for Tragedy, where, in a chapter titled “The Hero as Monster”, the hero himself becomes the monster. The site lists the seven as plots, by the editor’s decision, and records the overlap with the ten as placement, never identity.

The reviewers’ objections bear on this plot in particular because it carries the book’s opening argument. Adam Mars-Jones (2004) caught Booker misrepresenting the ending of Jaws and noted that the scheme ends up grading films against the archetype: in Booker’s verdict, as Mars-Jones reported it, Star Wars falls short because it does not liberate the anima. Michiko Kakutani (2005) gave a fair summary of the plot’s stages but found the book increasingly tendentious, and said its theories were largely borrowed from Jung, Freud, Campbell, Frazer and others, not always with acknowledgement. Denis Dutton’s review (2005) opened with the same Jaws and Beowulf pair and presented the plot as the first and most basic of the seven, found in stories from Gilgamesh and Little Red Riding Hood to the Bond film Dr. No.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Overcoming the Monster as a category that stories or readers actually sort into. Reagan and colleagues (2016), who classified the emotional arcs of 1,327 Project Gutenberg works into six shapes, cite Booker but say that an arc is not a plot, and give this plot as their example: Overcoming the Monster and Rags to Riches may have similar emotional arcs while being distinct plots. Their study is therefore not evidence for or against Booker’s scheme.

Appearances

The plot is a staple of writing advice. Jericho Writers’ guide to the seven plots gives Booker’s classic cases as Gilgamesh and Dracula and adds Stephen King’s It. Shmoop’s study guides file The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Faerie Queene under the plot in their “Booker’s Seven Basic Plots Analysis” pages. These are readings in Booker’s scheme by later writers, not his own examples.

Sources

• Booker, C. (2004). The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. London: Continuum. ISBN 978-0-8264-5209-2. Prologue to Part One; Part One, chs 1–2.
• Booker, C. (2004/2013). The Seven Basic Plots (paperback reprint, Bloomsbury). ISBN 978-0-8264-8037-8. Page numbers above are from this printing, checked in the Internet Archive copy: https://archive.org/details/sevenbasicplotsw0000book_v4w4
• Booker, C. (2024). The Seven Basic Plots (20th anniversary edition, preface by Nicholas Booker). Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-3994-1592-7. Chapter 1: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781399417440.ch-01
• Mars-Jones, A. (2004, 21 November). Terminator 2 good, The Odyssey bad. The Observer. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/nov/21/fiction.features
• Boddy, K. (2004, 21 November). Everything ever written boiled down to seven plots. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3632074/Everything-ever-written-boiled-down-to-seven-plots.html
• Kakutani, M. (2005, 15 April). The plot thins, or are no stories new? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/15/books/15book.html
• Dutton, D. (2005, May). Review of The Seven Basic Plots. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/05/AR2005050501385.html (excerpt reprinted by 3 Quarks Daily, 11 May 2005: https://3quarksdaily.com/?p=46090)
• Reagan, A. J., Mitchell, L., Kiley, D., Danforth, C. M., & Dodds, P. S. (2016). The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes. EPJ Data Science, 5, 31. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0093-1 (appendix A, arXiv:1606.07772)
• Jericho Writers. How to write seven basic plots. https://jerichowriters.com/how-to-write-seven-basic-plots/
• Shmoop. The Hound of the Baskervilles: Booker’s Seven Basic Plots Analysis. https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/hound-of-the-baskervilles/overcoming-the-monster-plot.html