archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Authored taxonomy · an archetype

Tragedy (Booker)

A bright wish followed past the point where it could be turned.

The sixth of Christopher Booker’s seven basic plots (2004). A hero is tempted into a forbidden course, prospers, then loses control and is destroyed, the only one of the seven that runs into darkness. A plot, not an archetype; Booker reads it as the ego taken over by the dark power.

Tragedy is the sixth of the seven plots in Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots (2004), and the one that breaks the pattern of the others. It is a plot, not an archetype and not a character. The name describes the shape of a whole story. A hero who is restless or unfulfilled is drawn towards some forbidden object or course of action: power, a lover, knowledge, a crime. Having committed himself, he does well for a while and seems to have got what he wanted. Then things begin to go wrong, he loses control, and to keep what he has seized he does worse and worse things. The forces he has roused close in, and the story ends in his destruction, at the hands of others or by his own choice.

Go deeper

At the threshold

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere wellIt were done quickly. If th’ assassinationCould trammel up the consequence, and catchWith his surcease success; that but this blowMight be the be-all and the end-all—here,But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,We’d jump the life to come. But in these casesWe still have judgement here; that we but teachBloody instructions, which being taught, returnTo plague th’ inventor. This even-handed justiceCommends th’ ingredience of our poison’d chaliceTo our own lips. He’s here in double trust:

Public domain · Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7 (1623)

Macbeth, before the act, says in his own words that he knows the cost and means to go through with it anyway.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 6 figures as a list
  1. Jung’s example

    Macbeth

    Booker, C. (2004). The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (London: Continuum), Part One, ch. 8, ‘Tragedy (I): The Five Stages’, p. 154, and passim. Checked against the full text of the 2013 paperback reprint, https://archive.org/details/sevenbasicplotsw0000book_v4w4 (2026-10-22), 1606

    Booker returns to this play more than to any other: a prophecy, a murder, and a narrowing.

  2. Jung’s example

    Faust

    Booker, C. (2004). The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (London: Continuum), Part One, ch. 8, ‘Tragedy (I): The Five Stages’, one of its five opening examples, pp. 154, 156. Checked against the full text of the 2013 paperback reprint, https://archive.org/details/sevenbasicplotsw0000book_v4w4 (2026-10-22), 1808

    A scholar’s bargain with the devil, one of the stories with which Booker opens the plot of Tragedy.

  3. Jung’s example

    The Picture of Dorian Gray

    Booker, C. (2004). The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (London: Continuum), Part One, ch. 8, ‘Tragedy (I): The Five Stages’, pp. 153, 158–159. Checked against the full text of the 2013 paperback reprint, https://archive.org/details/sevenbasicplotsw0000book_v4w4 (2026-10-22), 1890

    One life lived fair and one hidden in a portrait, until they meet.

  4. Jung’s example

    Citizen Kane

    Booker, C. (2004). The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (London: Continuum), Part Three, ch. 29, ‘The Mystery’ (section ‘Citizen Kane: The Mystery as Tragedy’), where he reads it as a mystery shaped by the five-stage plot of Tragedy, pp. 509–510. Checked against the full text of the 2013 paperback reprint, https://archive.org/details/sevenbasicplotsw0000book_v4w4 (2026-10-22), 1941

    A rise in power ends in a house full of things and a single lost word.

  5. Jung’s example

    Madame Bovary

    Booker, C. (2004). The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (London: Continuum), Part One, ch. 8, ‘Tragedy (I): The Five Stages’, pp. 153, 162, 164–166. Checked against the full text of the 2013 paperback reprint, https://archive.org/details/sevenbasicplotsw0000book_v4w4 (2026-10-22), 1857

    A wife’s dream of a larger life, which Booker reads for its unusually long anticipation stage before the fall.

  6. Jung’s example

    Bonnie and Clyde

    Booker, C. (2004). The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (London: Continuum), Part One, ch. 8, ‘Tragedy (I): The Five Stages’, its third example, pp. 160–161. Checked against the full text of the 2013 paperback reprint, https://archive.org/details/sevenbasicplotsw0000book_v4w4 (2026-10-22), 1967

    Two outlaws’ dream run of robberies that narrows towards the ambush.

The wider sky

Where the Tragedy (Booker) has been seen

34 exemplars across 6 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it:Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God,And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,In being depriv'd of everlasting bliss?O, Faustus, leave these frivolous demands,Which strike a terror to my fainting soul!

Public domain · Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1604)

The devil’s own report from the far side of the bargain: the loss is not a future event but a place the speaker already lives.

It begins well, with the first step taken in sunlight.

Each small escape closes a door behind him.

At the end, the fault that drove him is the only thing he has left to look at.

The deep layer · what was written

Tragedy (Booker): the entry

Definition

Tragedy is the sixth of the seven plots in Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots (2004), and the one that breaks the pattern of the others. It is a plot, not an archetype and not a character. The name describes the shape of a whole story. A hero who is restless or unfulfilled is drawn towards some forbidden object or course of action: power, a lover, knowledge, a crime. Having committed himself, he does well for a while and seems to have got what he wanted. Then things begin to go wrong, he loses control, and to keep what he has seized he does worse and worse things. The forces he has roused close in, and the story ends in his destruction, at the hands of others or by his own choice.

Booker sets the plot out in five named stages: an Anticipation Stage, a Dream Stage, a Frustration Stage, a Nightmare Stage, and a Destruction or Death-Wish Stage. Four of them are the names he gives the stages of Overcoming the Monster, and the parallel is plain. In the happy plots the hero moves through darkness to wholeness; in Tragedy, as Booker put it in words Michiko Kakutani (2005) quoted, the hero is “held back by some fatal flaw or weakness” and doomed to fall short. He reads this through Jung: the tragic hero is an ego so taken over by the dark power that, in his third tragedy chapter, the hero has become the monster, and his destruction restores the wider order he violated. 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. Tragedy takes three chapters of Part One, “The Seven Gateways to the Underworld”, more than any other plot.

Chapter 8, “The Five Stages”, opens with five stories chosen because they look unlike one another, checked against the text of the paperback reprint: the Greek myth of Icarus, the German legend of Faust (pp. 154, 156), Shakespeare’s Macbeth (p. 154), Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Nabokov’s Lolita (pp. 154–155). Further examples follow: Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (pp. 158–159), Bizet’s Carmen (pp. 159–160), the film Bonnie and Clyde (pp. 160–161), Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (pp. 161–162), and, as two final examples of the plot in its full form, Anna Karenina (pp. 162–164) and Madame Bovary (pp. 164–166). Julius Caesar (pp. 166–167) is read as the tragedy of Brutus. Chapter 9, “The Divided Self”, takes up heroes and heroines pulled two ways, with Antony and Cleopatra among its cases. Chapter 10, “The Hero as Monster”, takes heroes who themselves become the monster, with Richard III and Jekyll, and then turns to tragedies of redemption, where the hero has a change of heart before the end: King Lear (pp. 184–185), Wagner’s Tannhäuser, the story of Samson (p. 186), the Oresteia (pp. 187–189) and Romeo and Juliet (pp. 189–190). Later in the book Booker reads Citizen Kane as a mystery shaped by the five stages of Tragedy, and gives a separate chapter to Oedipus Tyrannus and Hamlet.

Booker’s sources are partly plain. The flaw goes back to Aristotle’s account of tragedy, and Kakutani (2005) named the Shakespeare critic A. C. Bradley among the writers whose ideas on Tragedy and Comedy Booker reworked, not always with acknowledgement. The five stages, the three-chapter scheme, the place of Tragedy among 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 shadow and the hero, because Booker’s tragic hero is a hero possessed. It is neither figure. Jung’s shadow is the unacknowledged side of a personality, an archetype in his sense; Booker’s Tragedy is a sequence of stages, and his “dark power” is a structural role in every plot, not Jung’s concept. The site lists the seven as plots, by the editor’s decision.

Tragedy is also where the reviewers tested the scheme hardest. Adam Mars-Jones (2004) granted that for more than two hundred pages Booker deals with plots as shapes, extracting a single five-part template from Icarus, Faust, Macbeth, Jekyll and Hyde and Lolita, but objected that a plot is only one element of a work, and that Booker has nothing to say about the others. He judged the chapter on Oedipus Rex and Hamlet the best in the book, because those two masterpieces are exceptions to some of Booker’s own rules. Kakutani (2005) found Booker’s arguments about Tragedy and Comedy “highly familiar”, and Publishers Weekly (2005) said Booker accused those who disagree with him of “limited ego-consciousness”, which did not help his case.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Booker’s Tragedy 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, name two of their arcs after tragic myths, “Icarus” (rise then fall) and “Oedipus” (fall, rise, fall), and give Anna Karenina as Booker’s example of this plot. But they state that an emotional arc is not a plot, so their result neither supports nor refutes his scheme.

Appearances

In writing advice Booker’s Tragedy is usually taught through Macbeth, his own example. Jericho Writers’ guide to the seven plots adds Lolita, Othello, King Lear, Frankenstein, The Great Gatsby and Anna Karenina. Shmoop’s study guides file The Great Gatsby, Madame Bovary and Aeschylus’s Agamemnon under the plot in their “Booker’s Seven Basic Plots Analysis” pages. These are later readings in Booker’s scheme; The Great Gatsby, for instance, is not among his tragedies.

Sources

Leaving

I met a traveller from an antique landWho said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:And on the pedestal these words appear:‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away.

Public domain · Shelley, Ozymandias (1818)

The fall at its furthest: a king’s boast stands on a pedestal in a field of sand, and nothing else is left.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey◐ ShadowThe face we never show to the world.Return to the void