During the 1960’s, a man called Vladimir Propp came up with different theories for the structure of a book or film. Propp researched many different books to gain the information he needed for the theories. He then made a set of steps and characters that are mostly used in every book. Keeping to the theories of Propp, I will go though my book and see if his theories work with my book of Theseus and the Minotaur.

In Propp’s Character theory, all most every book has a certain set of characters that are used in every book, this doesn’t mean that the same character form one book is used again and again, it means the way the character is.

According to Propp’s Character theory, The Hero is the character that leads the narrative and has good characteristics. My character Theseus is this character because he is the one who saves the day in my book. He is the one who everyone loves and wants to see defeat the villain. The villain is the person who would be the ‘bad guy’ the person you don’t like or someone who acts in bad ways which make the people reading the book dislike this person. In my story my villain is more than on character, my villain is king Mino, he is the person who sends everyone to the Minotaur to get killed by it. Even though he is the villain he is also more than one character in this story. He is also the princess’ father, this means he is the one who is the father of the princess but he also gives Theseus a sort of quest to go and try defeat the Minotaur. So a character in a story can be more than one character, which makes them more interesting.

Because my story has so little characters a lot of the characters have more than one character in them. This means that one character can have more than one character role, this makes them more important to the story. Like my other character Ariadne she is the princess in my story, but she is also the donor and the helper. This makes her the character with the most character roles in my story. She is the person who will be the goal that the hero needs to get at the end, like the prize of defeating the Minotaur. But when she first meets Theseus she wants to help him buy giving him some string so he can find his way of out the labyrinth, so this also makes her the donor by giving him the string to get out and it also makes the helper because she is the person helping Theseus to get out of the labyrinth. This makes her a very important character to the story.

In my story I only use 7 out of the 8 character roles because for one of the character roles, I don’t have a character for that role. I have one last one which is the dispatcher, this character gives the hero his mission to do, his quest, this makes the hero have the quest. Theseus dad, the king of Athens is the dispatcher in my book. At the beginning of the story Theseus and his dad are talking and his dad tells him to go to Crete to kill the Minotaur, this is the quest through out the book.

Many different people started to come up with different theories for books now, another man was Todorov who was a Russian structuralist and he came up with a narrative structure that works for nearly every book. This is about how the story was made and how a book goes through a certain path from start to finish.

His easiest structure had three main events which take place in the book, the first part or the beginning of the story is the Equilibrium, this is a normal day for the main character, where nothing has changed and everyone is happy with there normal day. Then there’s the Disequilibrium this is where something happens in the story which isn’t like a normal day, this can be as small as missing a bus or as big as a dragon burning a house down, this in most cases leads on to the main story of them fighting or doing a quest to get back to normal day lives, the Equilibrium. Lastly there is the New Equilibrium; this is just where the main character or another set of characters lives a normal life again, or what they now see as normal.

In my book, the Equilibrium is where Theseus and his father are used to the king of Crete taking people to feed to the Minotaur, for Theseus and his father this is like a normal day for them, that this is a normal day making it the Equilibrium. Going through the story Theseus goes to Crete to stop the Minotaur and to stop the king of Crete taking their people. This is the Disequilibrium because it adds a new element to it something different to the normal everyday life they had before. This creates a quest for the characters to try get back to a normal life where there is no Minotaur and everything is fine. So Theseus goes to Crete and kills the Minotaur. This then creates the New Equilibrium where everything is normal and life is now back to how it should be. However its not back to the same where people are getting fed to the minotaur its more of a new normal life for them where nothing bad is going on and nothing needs sorting out.