There’s a critical tool that I think is extremely helpful when it comes to analysing the key features of the climax of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s a well-known theory about story structure that you may already be aware of. In 1949, Joseph Campbell was the first person to state an idea that we now take for granted: the notion that a great many stories conform to a similar underlying pattern. Since then, the theory has been revisited many times by many different authors, but all propose a similar story pattern – it has come to be known as ‘the hero’s journey’. The clearest description of this pattern is probably by Christopher Vogler in his book from 2007, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers. This is the outline he describes.
1. The hero is called to adventure.
2. The hero leaves their ordinary world for an extraordinary domain.
3. The hero undergoes various tests.
4. The hero experiences a crisis – their greatest and most transformative ordeal.
5. At the climax of the story, the hero undergoes a symbolic death and rebirth.
6. The hero returns to their ordinary world to share the benefits of their adventure.
Vogler goes into some detail when discussing the ‘crisis’ or major ordeal that heroes undergo during their journey. He talks in terms of a ‘cave’ (symbolic or literal) that the hero approaches and enters. Below, I’ve listed some of the key features of the cave and the ordeal, as described by Vogler.
• The cave is located at the very heart of the extraordinary world.
• The cave will be heavily defended.
• The hero may be warned not to enter.
• The audience must be reminded that the stakes are high.
• The hero may pause at the threshold of the cave, for example to summon courage, plan or engage in reconnaissance.
• Before the cave can be entered, a series of tests must be passed.
• If there is a team of protagonists trying to get to the cave, they may regroup and recommit.
• There will be a point beyond which only the one true hero can go – the team must be left behind.
• The ordeal in the cave is the greatest source of terror and wonder the hero could experience. It will usually involve coming face to face with an archenemy.
• In the encounter, the hero will be acting out their inner struggle – the archenemy represents the shadow side of their character.
• The hero appears to die but is reborn.
It strikes me that these observations correspond very closely to the key characteristics of the climactic sequence in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which are described in Chapters Sixteen and Seventeen. I’ll take Vogler’s observations in order and identify the equivalent moments in the novel.
• The events of Chapters Sixteen and Seventeen take place in a location deep below Hogwarts – the main stage of the novel’s action.
• The location is concealed, forbidden and can only be accessed via a single trapdoor, which is guarded by a vicious monster.
• When Harry and his inner circle are making for the trapdoor, Neville intercepts them from losing more house points.
• As Harry is trying to reason with Neville, he can’t forget the seriousness of the situation – he has one eye on the time: ‘Harry looked at the grandfather clock by the door. They couldn’t afford to waste any more time, Snape might even now be playing Fluffy to sleep.’
• At the trapdoor itself, Harry and the others have an anxious moment: ‘Seeing the open door somehow seemed to impress upon all three of them what was facing them.’
• On the other side of the trapdoor, there is a sequence of tests waiting for them. A vicious plant, elusive flying keys, a violent chess game and a riddle.
• While dealing with the tests, there are moments of disagreement: ‘”Do you want to stop Snape or not?”’ says Ron when he’s challenged on his chess tactics.
• The final test involves bottles of liquid – only one of them will get you through a black fire that protects the chamber where the Philosopher’s Stone is thought to be. Harry has to drink that.
• The highpoint of the novel’s climatic sequence is the face-to-face encounter between Harry and Voldemort. This evil wizard has been a dark presence in Harry’s life, having murdered his parents. Within the wider world of the novel, even Voldemort’s name is enough to strike terror into people’s hearts. The scar on Harry’s forehead is a sign of the threat from Voldemort. But it is also a reminder of a deep mystery – Voldemort was badly damaged when he last tried to kill Harry.
• In the Sorting Hat episode, earlier in the novel, it became clear that Harry had the potential to follow an evil path as a hanger-on of Voldemort. This is the inner struggle that the conflict in Chapter Seventeen acts out. In fact, J.K. Rowling includes a metaphor that perfectly describes a human soul that has lost the battle with its shadow side: Quirrell hosting Voldemort on the back of his head.
• Harry falls unconscious during the struggle with Quirrell/Voldemort but comes round and finds himself safe with Dumbledore.
Of course, we can’t separate the climactic sequence of the novel from the story that precedes it. If we consider the main body of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, it too has many points of correspondence with the journey described by Vogler and others: Harry is called out of his ordinary life with the Dursleys into the extraordinary world of Hogwarts, where he undergoes the various challenges associated with the Bildungsroman, Fantasy and Mystery plots.
However, I think it’s unwise to treat ‘the hero’s journey’ as a key that unlocks every aspect of a story. It can blind you to the many other ways of analysing a text and cause you gloss over the unique aspects of an author’s achievement. There is also a tendency I’ve observed (and occasionally fallen victim to) for literary critics to twist and distort stories in order to make them fit Vogler’s pattern. You only have to ask yourself, what is the climax stage of ‘the hero’s journey’ in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone if the confrontation with Voldemort is to be considered the crisis stage. The novel is over and done within a few pages of the showdown. Maybe you could argue that the events in the forbidden forest are the true crisis stage, which would make the clash with Voldemort the climax stage. But that doesn’t really stand up to a close comparison of Vogler’s descriptions and the detail of the novel, and, in any case, that way madness lies!
That said, I do think this influential theory helps us to see what makes the climactic sequence of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone so effective. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that J.K. Rowling has read the Vogler book, or something like it. It’s certainly no surprise to me that most of the subsequent Harry Potter books have a similar final encounter with evil.
Narrative Structure
Stories with Multiple Timeframes
There’s no doubt that Stephen King’s novel IT, and the various adaptations for cinema and TV, have an almost unique claim to cult status in the horror genre. However, I am strongly of the opinion that this eerie tale of past trauma and present-day striving for redemption is much more than just the world’s favourite scary story. In my view, it’s a work of art with a technical assurance that puts it up there with the best of literary fiction.
The most impressive of Stephen King’s achievements in IT is, without doubt, the double narrative – allowing stories from 1958 and 1985 to run alongside one another and interact in complex ways. For a full account of how he approaches that challenge, you can check out the Popular Fiction Masterclass title Write Like Stephen King. But in this blog post I’m going to cast a fresh light on the technique. I’ll be looking at how other novelists and screen writers make use of double narratives to pursue their own artistic ends.
Let me start by giving a couple of anti-examples. These are stories that illustrate what IT is not. Firstly, IT is not structured around flashbacks. A flashback is a window into the past that is forever anchored in the present – a story about the past is being told by someone in the present. A good example would be the movie The Usual Suspects. Its story is largely told in hindsight by a man being interviewed by the police. The past narrative therefore derives its meaning and pretext entirely from the present-day recollection.
It’s true that there are a number of occasions on which Stephen King’s characters are launched from 1985 back into their own 1958 childhoods by moments of recollection. For example, in Part 2 we see a number of chapter section endings that cut off a sentence in mid-flow as a character is in full reminiscence, then resume it back in 1958 at the start of the next section. But that is by no means always the case. The transition between the years is often unannounced. In fact, by Part 5 it’s intentionally difficult to tell which year we’re meant to be in. This means that the 1958 and 1985 narratives have a separate existence with no dependence and very little anchoring.
It’s interesting to note that, in The Usual Suspects, the flashback is almost the entirety of the movie. As in that great cinematic classic, Citizen Kane, the writer has pushed the flashback structure to its very limit – way beyond the cliché of a shimmering screen followed by a brief, voiced-over episode from the past. And yet, for all that, the past narrative in The Usual Suspects remains anchored in the present. The final moments of the present-day narrative, which reveal the identity of master criminal Keyser Söze, complete the meaning of the flashback scenes.
In IT, the 1958 story could have an independent existence as a novel and it would be a perfectly satisfying read. The presence of a 1985 story adds another dimension to it but doesn’t complete it as such. In that sense, we’re seeing a more elusive and ambitious narrative project.
Now my second anti-example – the movie Donnie Darko. In many ways this account of the events leading up to a devastating accident are exploring territory that’s very similar to IT. Circularity is the defining structural principle of both narratives. Donnie Darko begins with the destruction of a house by an aircraft engine that seems to fall out of nowhere and ends with a depiction of the events that lie behind the aircraft accident. IT is full of circular structures, but the most prominent is the central characters’ exact repetition of their childhood rebellion against a supernatural foe. The difference is that the movie tears up the normal rules of time and space and simply plugs the end of the narrative into the beginning. As such, it arguably sits within the time travel genre. By contrast, the novel restricts its circularity to narrative structures as experienced by the reader rather than life events as experienced by the characters. Stephen King flirts with the idea that the 1985 events are influencing the 1958 events but keeps that firmly within the bounds of metaphor. For example, Mike Hanlon (in 1958) walks past the house where he would live 1985 and (we are conspicuously informed) feels nothing!
Both Donnie Darko and IT are using the idea of circularity to evoke the disturbed inner world of their central characters, but it has to be said that Stephen King’s approach is a much subtler instrument. The sections on narrative in my book Write Like Stephen King fully describe the many variations on the novel’s circularity metaphor.
Let’s move on and look at some examples of writers doing things with double narratives that are very similar to IT.
My first example is a novel that quite clearly falls into the ‘literary fiction’ category: Waterland by Graham Swift. I’m not at all embarrassed to place a bestselling horror novel alongside a modern classic that appears on university reading lists. I believe IT should be seen as part of the same cultural landscape as literary fiction. Waterland has its own double narrative. It takes place in rural Norfolk before the war and London in the 1980s. The central characters are seen undergoing a traumatic coming of age that leaves them unable to have children. In parallel, we are shown the consequences of this sterility – a psychological and marital crisis late in the characters’ lives. One of the defining characteristics of Waterland (and many other novels that are considered ‘postmodern’) is the fact that it uses its narrative structure as a kind of metaphor to express its own thematic meanings. Specifically, the double narrative – alternation between pre-war Norfolk and post-war London – seems to mimic one of the novel’s central images: the idea of circularity and inescapable patterns of behaviour. The story of Waterland is full of images reflecting that idea – eels being the most important one. We hear how these creatures swim all the way to the Sargasso sea to breed, whereupon their young swim all the way back to the waterways of Norfolk. The to-and-fro movement between past and present in the novel powerfully expresses this strange, cyclical behaviour.
This metaphorical use of structure is also seen in IT. In fact, the meaning expressed through that technique is rather similar to the circularity idea in Waterland. Cycles of harmful behaviour (social and psychological) are found everywhere in IT – guilt, alcoholism, inappropriate sexual relationships, and so on. Almost every character and community in the novel seems to be going round in destructive circles, unable to leave their past behind. The novel mimics this in its alternation between past and present. As the 1958 and 1985 stories are narrated in parallel, with the same group of characters undergoing two very similar journeys at 27 years remove, the reader begins to feel the disorienting weirdness of that inability to escape harmful behaviour.
The idea of a double narrative, with one story set in the past and one in the future, has become a very familiar feature of contemporary literature and cinema. The metaphorical possibilities have been recognised by authors both literary and popular, but there are other approaches to the double narrative structure that can be equally powerful. Let’s now look at a movie example that illustrates a slightly different approach.
The Godfather Part II cuts between the early life of mob boss Vito Corleone – In turn-of-the century Sicily then New York – and the experiences of his son and successor Michael Corleone half a century later. This is no mere flashback fest since there is no dependency between the two narratives. Vito’s early life is not being recalled by someone within Michael’s story, for example. Nor does the 1950s story complete or explain the earlier events in a way that’s similar to The Usual Suspects.
The parallel narration of Vito’s and Michael’s stories does not seem to serve a metaphorical purpose akin to the use of narrative structure in IT. Naturally, it’s no less expressive for that. Its main strength is that it creates a gap across which sparks of meaning can jump. Similar themes surface in both Corleone narratives – family, loyalty, revenge, religion, roots, the responsibility of leadership etc. – and we are able to consider from different perspectives thanks to the differing events of Vito’s and Michael’s lives. For example, Vito returns to Sicily to take revenge on his mother’s killer. By contrast, Michael kills a family member – Fredo, his brother. However, there’s a strange act of mercy in that he waits for his mother to die before ordering the killing. It’s a beautiful and poetic technique, capable of creating an incredibly rich fabric of interconnecting meanings.
This concludes my brief survey of the double narrative structure. It’s now over to you. Can you think of any movies or novels that make use of it? If so, what specific purpose does it serve?