A Simple — and Brilliant — Storytelling Model from the Author of “Fight Club”
Explaining and expanding upon a set of archetypes described by Chuck Palahniuk.
In his book Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different, Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club and a bunch of other novels that aren’t Fight Club) offers anecdotes, exercises, and reams of advice to aspiring writers. He opens each section with the refrain “If I were your teacher…” and then goes on to say what, as this model teacher, he would say, ask, or assign to us.
One thing he assures us he would not do as our teacher is provide a formula for writing a bestseller. Even if such a formula existed, he says, it would ultimately be self-defeating because a million other writers would use it and the market would become over-saturated with carbon copies of the same essential stories. (That doesn’t sound at all like some corners of the publishing and TV/film industries, does it?)
Cheekily, however, he does suggest that if you want to write a book that sells a million copies, you might try this:
- Include a character who is a rebel, transgressing the norms and violating the rules of whatever authority governs the world of the story.
- Include a second character who is a good boy or girl, fastidiously adhering to those same rules and norms.
Up to this point, there’s nothing all that breathtaking about his observation. The opposition of a rebellious character with one who is well-behaved to the point of being repressed is a fairly obvious pairing, one that anyone who’s spun a few yarns has probably stumbled upon intuitively.
What gives the model power is the fate that awaits each of the characters:
- The rebel is, literally or figuratively, executed for their unrepentant deviation from the norm.
- The good boy or girl literally or figuratively commits suicide out of shame for their unworthiness.
This may seem like a frightening expression of the power of narrative to serve as a kind of social regulation, but its true power is psychological. The process that Carl Jung called individuation — becoming a mature, fully developed self — involves bringing into balance these countervailing tendencies: the childish petulance of our inner rebel and the equally childish obedience of our inner good boy/girl. If either remains dominant in the psyche, one suffers from an inflamed or insecure ego. What happens in stories that follow this model is a dramatic externalization of the inner confrontations by which these immature psychic patterns are transcended.
The whole model is a dramatic enactment of the psychological processes that determine our development.
But there’s more to it than that. If it were simply a matter of each of the characters getting their comeuppance, the audience would be left feeling that no good has come of the ordeal. No value would be transmitted by the conclusion… which is a bummer.
That’s why we need a third character: An observer who watches all this go down and benefits from the lesson of the other two characters’ fates. They emerge from the drama having absorbed its lesson, reclaiming and redeeming the lost value. Returning to the Jungian view, this observer represents the integrated self that results from the process of individuation.
The whole model is a dramatic enactment of the psychological processes that determine our development. In this way, it’s not unlike other story models, including Joseph Campbell’s “Monomyth” and Christopher Booker’s “Seven Basic Plots,” each of which purports to represent the primal forms of human development in external narratives.
Among other examples, Palahniuk cites One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Dead Poets Society as two iconic pieces of 20th-century American storytelling that typify this character pattern.
In the first, the new patient MacMurphy (played by Jack Nicholson in the film adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel) is the rebel, defying every rule of the psychiatric hospital where the story is set. Billy Babbit is the good boy, in a state of paranoia about the slightest transgression getting back to his mother. The book’s narrator, Chief Bromden, is the observer, who achieves liberation — at least temporarily — as a result of his encounters with the other two.
In Dead Poets Society, promising senior Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard) is the good boy, the prep school’s new English teacher John Keating (Robin Williams) is the rebel, and Neil’s new roommate Todd Anderson (Ethan Hawke) is the observer. In each, the rebel and good boy encounter their pre-ordained fates and the observer emerges liberated from the ordeal.
But Palahniuk’s analysis, astute as it is, isn’t quite complete.
In plot terms, a critical element is that the rebel lures the good boy or girl into a momentary transgression and that this is what precipitates the latter’s ‘suicide’ and the former’s ‘execution’.
In character terms, there is a third archetypal character we must add into the mix: the tyrant.
In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, MacMurphy struggles against the tyrannical power of Nurse Ratched, one of the great villains of modern literature and, as portrayed by Louise Fletcher, American cinema. After MacMurphy tempts Billy into a momentary transgression — sleeping with one of the sex workers MacMurphy has brought into the facility — Ratched becomes the arbiter of Billy Babbit’s lamentable suicide, threatening to tell his mother what he’s done so that he kills himself in a fit of uncontrollable shame. She is also the agent of MacMurphy’s figurative execution when he is lobotomized after attacking her in a rage over Billy’s death.
Chief Bromden, upon seeing how the life has been cut out of MacMurphy, hoists a heavy control panel (a water fountain in the film version) that MacMurphy had unsuccessfully tried to lift earlier in the story, and uses it to smash a window and escape — though some early phrases in the book suggest, rather bleakly, that he may have been caught and returned to the hospital.
More powerfully, his reclamation of value from the ordeal spreads to the community around him as his classmates join him in rising onto their seats in defiance of the comically tyrannical headmaster.
At the start of Dead Poets Society, the beloved film written by Tom Schulman and directed by Peter Weir, we meet Todd Anderson (Ethan Hawke), a junior at an eminent boarding school, as he comes into the circle of his new roommate, golden-boy senior Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard). Todd meets Neil’s friends, attends intimidating classes, and adjusts to his new lodgings.
But more than anything, Todd observes. He observes how the other boys interact with their environment — especially Neil. He observes how life operates in this elevated stratum within the rarefied milieu of the “best preparatory school in the United States,” as proclaimed by the headmaster in his bloviating opening address.
And, as the main dramatic action of the film commences, Todd observes how their iconoclastic new teacher, John Keating (Robin Williams), challenges every assumption the students have been given about what constitutes a proper education.
Here, we see the roles playing out in precisely the same manner as in Cuckoo’s Nest. Robin Williams’ rebellious John Keating lures Robert Sean Leonard’s good-boy Neil Perry into auditioning for the school play — causing them both to run afoul of Neil’s tyrannical father, a doctor who demands the same for his son and forbids him to continue in this ridiculous pursuit. Neil, ashamed and hopeless, kills himself. Keating, blamed by Neil’s father and the school’s administration (an institutional extension of the tyrannical impulse) for the tragedy, is fired.
Meanwhile, Ethan Hawke’s Todd observes all of this and, at the film’s climax, finds the courage to stop observing and instead speak truth to power. He asserts his liberty, demonstrating that he has learned from the encounter and become an integrated human being. More powerfully, his reclamation of value from the ordeal spreads to the community around him as his classmates join him in rising onto their seats in defiance of the comically tyrannical headmaster.
(One could, of course, argue that the ending of Poets valorizes the rebellious streak represented by Keating — as the boys call him their “captain” — meaning that a transcendent balance hasn’t been struck and the psycho-drama will inevitably repeat itself… but we’ll let that go for now.)
The two examples above follow more or less the same pattern with the arrangement of the character roles within the drama, with the rebel and good boy/girl being victims of the system and the observer emerging as a veiled protagonist. But it doesn’t have to be this way. One of the great things about this paradigm is just how flexible it is.
The rebel can just as easily be the protagonist, as can the good boy or girl (see the examples below). The roles can also be combined, as Palahniuk did himself in Fight Club, with the good-boy narrator and his alter-ego Tyler Durden as the rebel and, in the second half of the narrative, tyrant synthesizing into the observer through the story’s climactic murder/suicide.
Rather than a peculiar feature of modern American fiction, this seems to be an archetypal pattern, baked into the social dynamics that govern our narratives.
Once you start looking, you begin to see this arrangement everywhere.
In John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, Sister Aloysius (the protagonist) is the good girl, Father Flynn is the rebel, Sister James is the observer. Sister Aloysius also wields despotic control over the school she runs while suffering under the larger tyranny of the Catholic church’s male hierarchy.
In the film version of Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, 2007), Theo (Clive Owen) is the good boy, Julian (Julianne Moore) is the rebel, Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) is the observer, and Luke (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is the tyrant.
The musical Rent triples the arrangement, with the pairings of good-boy Roger & rebel Mimi, good-boy Collins & rebel Angel, and good-girl Joanne & rebel Maureen all revolving around the narrator/observer Marc. (The rather feckless tyrant here is Benny, the play’s weakest element but also the catalyst for much of its dramatic action.)
Palahniuk seems to regard this model as uniquely American and modern, citing it as lying at the heart of many of the most popular American books and movies of the 20th Century. This is odd, as one can readily find examples of older works from other countries that more or less follow the pattern, including Anna Karenina, Les Miserables, and The Brothers Karamazov.
Even the most famous work of English literature, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, follows the pattern, with the rebellious title character being killed, the good-girl Ophelia committing suicide, the double tyrants of Claudius and the ghost of Hamlet’s father lording over things, and the observer Horatio living to tell the tale and deliver Hamlet’s dying vote to Fortinbras, a symbol of maturity and integration with the wider social world (i.e. transcending the lesser ego).
Rather than a peculiar feature of modern American fiction, this seems to be an archetypal pattern — a version, perhaps, of what Christopher Booker called “the archetypal family drama” — baked into the social dynamics that govern our narratives.
It would be fascinating to catalogue where else variations on the theme appear. And if you’re a writer of fiction or drama, you might want to take Chuck Palahniuk’s model out for a spin.
