A
boy moves away from his home, from a tainted society: his mother and
the leader of the community want to kill him, and the society itself
is at war. In a place far from home, a fantasy land where a ten-headed
ogre lives, the boy confronts another form of evil. That fantasy land
becomes a storyteller's way of commenting on the realistic land with
which the story opens. As the boy confronts this unbalanced world, he
is bringing balance to himself, represented by a sense of harmony with
nature; in so doing, he brings himself into a balanced relationship
with his society, achieving a sense of harmony with culture. When
a youth goes through a puberty ritual, his or her transformation into
adulthood, typically he or she goes through three stages: (1) the separation
stage, during which the youth is isolated from the home of childhood,
(2) the initiation or ordeal stage, the crucial part of the transformation,
because here is where the great struggle occurs within the psyche of
the youth, a struggle frequently represented in the oral stories by
a fight with a ogre or some sort of swallowing monster, and (3) the
return or reincorporation, when the young man or woman now returns to
a society, changed, transformed, prepared to be reincorporated with
this new identity.
A
boy moves away from his home, from a tainted society: his mother and
the leader of the community want to kill him, and the society itself
is at war. In a place far from home, a fantasy land where a ten-headed
ogre lives, the boy confronts another form of evil. That fantasy land
becomes a storyteller's way of commenting on the realistic land with
which the story opens. As the boy confronts this unbalanced world, he
is bringing balance to himself, represented by a sense of harmony with
nature; in so doing, he brings himself into a balanced relationship
with his society, achieving a sense of harmony with culture.