Booker’s seven plots

Booker’s seven are plots, not characters, and they belong in this index because the book is the most openly Jungian of the literary taxonomies. Thirty-four years in the writing, it argues that the stories humans tell fall into seven shapes: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, the Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy and Rebirth. Beneath them Booker places a single pattern taken from Jung: a story is a picture of the development and integration of the mature self, and what each of the other characters represents is some aspect of the hero’s own inner state. Booker’s Part Three adds two further chapters of the same kind, “Rebellion against ‘the One’” and “The Mystery”; they are his, but he does not count them among the seven, and this site gives them no entries. The provenance point is that the number seven and the plot names are Booker’s, dated 2004, and that the Jungian reading is his explicit frame rather than a gloss added later by readers. Reviewers found the prose weighed down by cliché and noted that Booker attributes disagreement with him to the critic’s limited ego-consciousness, which does not help his case. No study has tested the taxonomy.

Sources

• Booker, C. (2004). The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. Continuum. ISBN 978-0-8264-5209-2.
• Publishers Weekly review (the Jungian frame, the reviewers’ objections). https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780826452092
• Mars-Jones, A. (2004, 21 November). Terminator 2 good, The Odyssey bad. The Observer (thirty-four years in the writing, the Jungian frame). https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/nov/21/fiction.features
• 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
• Chapter titles and numbers, Part Three included (ch. 28, “Rebellion Against ‘The One’”; ch. 29, “The Mystery”): the chapter DOIs of the 2024 Bloomsbury edition, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781399417440