Christopher Booker is a scholar who wrote that every story falls into one of seven basic plot structures: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, the Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth. Shmoop explores which of these structures fits this story like Cinderella’s slipper.
Plot Type : Voyage and Return
Anticipation Stage
During this phase, the six narrators are children, just setting out in the world and struggling with the emotional turmoil and wonder that even a setting as seemingly yawn-inducing as a nursery school can inspire. They deal with issues on a small scale that will loom larger in adulthood: love and death.
Initial Fascination
The six narrators go off to boarding schools, which offer both plusses and minuses for the characters. During this stage, the boys meet Percival, a cool kid whose athleticism, wit, gracefulness, and fortitude set him apart and make him seem just plain awesome. The narrators use Percival to describe everything they are not.
Frustration Stage
We follow our narrators through adolescence and into young adulthood, discovering that they carry around some intense feelings. Neville grows tired of Bernard's endless storytelling and has strong, unrequited feelings (of lurve) for Percival; Susan claims to hate school and feel a total hatred for the people around her (primarily the teachers); Rhoda just feels plain alienated from everyone; Bernard can't get anyone to listen to him; and Louis frets that people are judging him for his Australian accent. Sounds like pretty garden-variety teenage angst to us?
Nightmare Stage
The six narrators then get some legit problems when their friend Percival dies, and they are forced to confront death and ponder the meaning of their existence and, also, the power and importance of human relationships. Yikes. Can we just go back to a time when the big drama was that Jinny kissed Louis?
Thrilling Escape and Return
At the end of the book, Bernard triumphs over all the yucky feelings of decline and imminent demise that have haunted the characters—and his own feelings of failure as an author/artist—in one fell swoop, resolving to continue his attempts to communicate and connect with others, because (according to the Gospel of Bernard) it is in the pursuit of meaning through language that one achieves endless vitality. This is a kinda-sorta happy ending. We've sort of returned to the happy place of childhood.