The Quest (Booker)

Definition

The Quest is the third of the seven plots in Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots (2004). It is a plot, not an archetype and not a character. The name describes the shape of a whole story. Life where the hero lives has become intolerable, and far away lies a goal worth any hardship: a treasure, a promised land, a lost home, a holy object. The hero sets out, usually with companions, and the journey brings monsters, temptations, a passage between two opposing dangers and often a descent into an underworld. Arriving within sight of the goal, the hero finds new obstacles in the way and must pass a last series of ordeals before the goal is won, often with a kingdom or a bride beside it.

Booker sets the plot out in five named stages: the Call; the Journey; Arrival and Frustration; the Final Ordeals; and the Goal. He distinguishes it from Voyage and Return, where the hero falls into another world by chance, by its purpose: the hero of the Quest knows what he is going for. He reads the plot through Jung. Companions complement one another and add up to a whole, a wise old guide points the way, and the goal stands for the wholeness the hero is moving towards, what Booker, after Jung, calls the Self. That reading is his frame, not a finding.

History

Booker published the book in London with Continuum in November 2004; 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. The Quest is chapter 4 of Part One, “The Seven Gateways to the Underworld”.

His examples, checked against the text of the paperback reprint, open with a list of the most celebrated stories in the world, which, he says, are quests: Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (all p. 69). He adds the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt (pp. 70, 72), Jason and the Argonauts (p. 73), the Grail quest, Stevenson’s Treasure Island (p. 69) and Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, and three popular modern cases: Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (pp. 69, 71), Richard Adams’s Watership Down (pp. 69, 70, 72, 75) and Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). The Odyssey (pp. 69–75) supplies his catalogue of the forms temptation takes, from the Sirens onward. The Lord of the Rings matters to him beyond this chapter: he analyses it in detail in chapters 19 and 34 and counts it among the very few stories that include all seven plots. Melville’s Moby-Dick closes the chapter (p. 86) and returns in Part Three (pp. 358–364) as the great dark version, Ahab’s quest to destroy what Booker reads as the Self.

Booker treats the pattern as given by the stories and its meaning as given by Jung. The resemblance among his examples is real, but much of it has a plainer cause. Kasia Boddy (2004) put it bluntly: the Aeneid, Tom Jones and Ulysses are a bit like the Odyssey because Virgil, Fielding and Joyce read Homer. The five stages, the name as one of seven plots and the Jungian reading are Booker’s, dated 2004.

The debate

What kind of thing is it? In the void the plot sits nearest the hero and the self. It is the closest of Booker’s seven to Joseph Campbell’s monomyth (1949), the hero’s departure, initiation and return (see the framework row), and Booker’s guide figures overlap Jung’s wise old man. But the Quest is a plot, a sequence of stages with a cast of roles, not an archetype in Jung’s sense, and Booker presents it as one shape among seven where Campbell offered a single pattern. The site lists the seven as plots, by the editor’s decision.

The Quest also became the reviewers’ figure for the book itself. Boddy (2004) turned it on the book: the basic plot of The Seven Basic Plots is the quest, a long journey in which the reader is led, step by step, towards the grail, with no stage allowed to be skipped. Adam Mars-Jones (2004) took the Odyssey as his counter-example. When Odysseus comes home he has the serving-women who slept with the suitors hanged, which, Mars-Jones argued, raises doubts about the healing balm of Booker’s happy endings without making the poem any less great. Michiko Kakutani (2005) used the Grail quest, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down to introduce the book’s thesis fairly, before judging its later chapters tendentious.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested the Quest as a category that texts 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 state that an emotional arc is not a plot, so their result neither supports nor refutes his scheme.

Appearances

Writing guides often illustrate the plot with modern fantasy. Jericho Writers’ guide to the seven plots gives His Dark Materials, The Lord of the Rings and, loosely, the last Harry Potter novel as examples. Shmoop’s study guides file works such as The Giver and The Call of the Wild under the plot in their “Booker’s Seven Basic Plots Analysis” pages. These are later readings in Booker’s 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. 4, “The Quest”; Part Three, ch. 21.
• 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 4: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781399417440.ch-04
• 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
• 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 Call of the Wild: Booker’s Seven Basic Plots Analysis. https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/the-call-of-the-wild/quest-plot.html