Independent Enjoyment: "Booker has not contented himself with delineating the seven plots: a book on which, heaven knows, would have been vast and ambitious enough. He goes on to discuss the single underlying theme that unites those plots, and then to consider the whole of human history in its light. This theme is that story is the means by which the collective unconscious calls us sinners to order, to abandon the selfish pursuit of ego in the name of a greater self that accepts a place in the hierarchy of an organic society. In this sort of society, everyone has a place"