Rebirth (Booker)

Definition

Rebirth, in Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots (2004), is the seventh and last of the story shapes he argues lie beneath all storytelling. It is a plot, not an archetype and not a character. The name describes the movement of a whole story. A central figure, usually young and unaware, falls under the shadow of a dark power. For a while the threat seems to recede. Then it returns and closes in until the hero or heroine is held in what Booker calls a state of living death: asleep, imprisoned, frozen or spiritually numb. This lasts so long that the dark power appears to have won. The release, when it comes, looks miraculous. An imprisoned heroine is freed by a hero; an imprisoned hero, by a young woman or a child.

Booker reads the shape through Jung. The dark power stands for the central figure’s own incompleteness, and the release is the ego opening to something larger than itself, so the plot pictures in compressed form the inner change he believes every story is finally about. That reading is Booker’s frame, not a finding. This entry records his plot. It is a different object from Jung’s rebirth, the archetype of transformation Jung described in his 1939 Eranos lecture, though Booker’s frame draws on the same psychology. The two pages are kept apart and cross-linked.

History

Booker published the book in London with Continuum in November 2004, after a project that reviewers reported had taken him thirty-four years (Mars-Jones 2004; Kakutani 2005). An American edition followed in 2005, the paperback was later reprinted under the Bloomsbury imprint, and a twentieth-anniversary edition with a preface by Nicholas Booker appeared in 2024. Rebirth is chapter 11 of Part One, “The Seven Gateways to the Underworld”, and it closes the sequence of seven. Booker comes back to it in Part Three, in the run of chapters on what he thinks goes wrong once the ego “takes over” a story.

His examples, checked against the text of the paperback reprint, begin with fairy tales. Sleeping Beauty (pp. 193–194) is the story he uses to name the plot; Snow White (pp. 194–195), The Frog Prince (p. 195), Beauty and the Beast and Andersen’s The Snow Queen (pp. 196–198) follow. He then turns to stories for adults in which the dark power is no longer a witch or an enchanter but a condition of the hero: Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (pp. 198–199), Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (pp. 200–202), George Eliot’s Silas Marner (pp. 202–203) and Burnett’s The Secret Garden (pp. 206–208), ending with Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (pp. 208–213), which he treats as the most complicated example of all. The redeemers follow his pattern: a child in Tiny Tim, a young girl in Sonia, and in Silas Marner a figure who combines both. Booker notes the overlap with his other plots as he goes: an Overcoming the Monster story can turn on the monster’s change of heart, Peer Gynt’s early life reads like the start of a Rags to Riches story, and a tale can be as much a Rebirth as a Comedy.

Where does it come from? Booker names Jung as his guide throughout. The overlap with Jung is real in content, since Jung’s rebirth is also a passage through a kind of death into renewal. But Jung set out no narrative sequence of this kind. The five steps, the roles of dark power, prisoner and redeemer, the name as one of seven plots and the choice of examples are Booker’s, dated 2004. Michiko Kakutani (2005) added that much of the theory was borrowed, not always with acknowledgement, from Jung, Freud, Campbell, Bettelheim, Frazer and others.

The debate

The first question is what kind of thing this is. Jung’s rebirth is an archetype of transformation, a typical situation rather than a figure. Booker’s Rebirth is a plot with parts: a sequence of stages and a cast of roles. Booker himself blurs the difference by calling his plots archetypal and complaining that modern stories have become “detached from their underlying archetypal purpose” (as quoted by Kakutani 2005). The site follows the editor’s decision and lists all seven as plots. Placement near the self and the shadow in the void records where Booker’s reading points, not an identity.

Rebirth also carries the weight of Booker’s larger thesis. Kasia Boddy (2004) noted that at the end of chapter 11 he tells readers to descend to a deeper level, where the seven turn out to be different perspectives on “the same great basic drama”, the move from constriction to a final opening out. Publishers Weekly (2005) summed that drama up as a Jungian picture of the development and integration of the mature self. Rebirth is where the taxonomy turns into a single meta-plot.

The reviewers’ objections bear directly on it. Adam Mars-Jones (2004) found a grotesque side to self-integration: the hero, having matured past his ego, learns that everyone else in the story was an aspect of himself all along, and the heroine’s function is to carry qualities he will absorb. That is the role Booker gives the redeeming girl. Boddy argued that Booker’s mystical sweep crowds out plainer explanations such as influence between writers, and that his claim to universality would have been stronger with non-Western examples. Kakutani judged the first half of the book informative and the readings of modern literature in the second half narrow and obtuse.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Booker’s Rebirth, or any of his seven plots, as a category that texts or readers actually fall into. The nearest work is computational. Reagan and colleagues (2016) classified the emotional arcs of 1,327 works of fiction from Project Gutenberg and found six core shapes. They cite Booker, but they state that an emotional arc is not a plot and that two of Booker’s plots might share one arc, so their result neither supports nor refutes his scheme.

Appearances

Outside the book the plot lives mainly in writing advice. Jericho Writers’ guide to the seven plots gives Beauty and the Beast, The Snow Queen, The Secret Garden and later retellings as Rebirth stories. Shmoop’s study guides assign novels such as Crime and Punishment and Silas Marner to the plot in their “Booker’s Seven Basic Plots Analysis” pages. Lists of this kind often add recent films and series that Booker did not discuss; they are readings in his scheme, not his examples.

Sources

• Booker, C. (2004). The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. London: Continuum. ISBN 978-0-8264-5209-2. Part One, ch. 11, “Rebirth”; Part Three, ch. 24.
• 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 11: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781399417440.ch-11
• Jung, C. G. (1940/1950). Concerning rebirth. CW 9i ¶199–258. Princeton University Press.
• 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
• Publishers Weekly (2005, 14 February). Review of The Seven Basic Plots. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780826452092
• 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
• 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 on plot theories in the arXiv version, arXiv:1606.07772)
• Jericho Writers. How to write seven basic plots. https://jerichowriters.com/how-to-write-seven-basic-plots/
• Shmoop. Crime and Punishment: Booker’s Seven Basic Plots Analysis. https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/crime-and-punishment/rebirth-plot.html