Bel Canto as Booker's Seven Basic Plots Analysis Plot

Plot Type : Voyage and Return

Anticipation Stage and "Fall" into the Other World

We often think of the voyage-and-return story as being about one brave, solitary hero, maybe Luke Skywalker in the moment when he's heading off to Dagobah alone (well, okay, alone except for R2-D2). But in Bel Canto, pretty much all the characters we first meet are about to be plunged into new experiences that will open their worlds to something new that changes them forever. Nobody knows it when the lights go out at the beginning of the novel, but the opera singer, the terrorists, and the guests are all about to fall into a strange new world. When they all realize in Chapter 1 that they're stuck in the house together, that's the dawn of that world.

Initial Fascination or Dream Stage

You know those pictures that look like one thing right-side-up and another upside-down? Well, Ann Patchett is doing a clever flip here, with a similar effect. Usually the characters would be initially excited about this strange new world, then get disenchanted in the next stage (subtly titled the "frustration stage").

But Bel Canto works the opposite way. Everyone is frustrated for the first part of the novel. The hostages don't want to be there. The terrorists don't even want to be there (since they originally planned to kidnap the president and leave). It feels like time stands still while they're all stuck outside of their usual worlds. They're totally frustrated.

Frustration Stage

And we see the other side of the flip in this stage. Instead of the frustration of a normal voyage-and-return story, we get the dream stage post-frustration. It begins when Roxane Coss gets a box of sheet music and starts to sing every day. Eventually things start to transform. Hostages and terrorists alike discover a whole new world of music, friendship, love, and art, together with people they would never have met in any other way. The world feels like a dream, and almost no one wants to wake up.

Nightmare Stage

And that's the cue for the dream to turn into a nightmare. In spite of vague threats and hints that things can't go on this way, most of the people in the house manage to forget that their interlude there will have to end. Until the military comes up through a tunnel and starts firing, anyway. In a nightmarish scenario, they kill all the insurrectionists, many of whom the hostages have come to see as friends or even in one case as a lover. Mr. Hosokawa is accidentally killed too. Yes, that qualifies as a nightmare, no question.

Thrilling Escape and Return

Most of the hostages do escape (getting them out is the whole point of the raid, after all). We see some of them back in the real world in the Epilogue, which is—you guessed it—the scene of escape and return. Some of them seem to have changed a lot, like Gen and Roxane, who are marrying each other, which is something they would not have considered before. And for obvious reasons: neither of them can marry the people they loved in their hostage world, since those people are both dead.

But Gen and Roxane both have to reenter reality, even if the other world changed them in some permanent way. They wind up deciding to do it together, for better or for worse. We hear a few updates on other folks, too. Some seem to be settling back into something like the lives they had before, such as Father Arguedas. Simon and Edith Thibault, who are wedding guests, have wanted to get back to each other the whole time (they were separated by the hostage crisis). They're thrilled to be back to everyday life together, but have moved away from the host country and it's pretty clear there are some big changes for them, too. So there are a number of different ways people return to reality in the book. What's key is that their reality will never be the same after the voyage they all took together to the dream world in Ruben's mansion.