| A boy leaves home after quarrelling with his father. He sets out on a walk through the forest in the heat of the day and falls down into a deep pit. The father comes out in search of the son, peers into the pit, but is unable to see him because of the darkness. At that moment the sun has risen to a point directly overhead, illuminates the pit's depths with its rays and allows the father to rescue his child. After a joyous reconciliation, they return home together. |
A structuralist would schematize the story, probably using a diagram. The story is made up of signs, which come in units that themselves do not have significance (like "phonemes" in language, these could be called "mythemes.") .
So, for example, the first unit is "boy quarrels with father". That might be represented as "low rebels against high". The boy's walk through the forest is a movement on a horizontal line, in contrast to the low/high axis. The fall into a pit is "low" again; the sun at its zenith is "high". By shining into the pit, the high becomes low, which is a kind of inversion, a reversal of the original, where low struck out against high. The reconciliation restores a balance, walking horizontally again along the movement axis, in the middle.