Essay Comparing Rushdie's Haroun And The Sea Of Stories

The Three Elixirs in Rushdie’s “Haroun and the sea of stories.” Rushdie’s “Haroun and the sea of stories” follows the structure of the hero’s journey. At the end of every hero’s journey, the hero would always come back home (or the ordinary world) with an elixir of some kind. An elixir can be anything that transforms the hero into a different person. In Rushdie’s “Haroun and the sea of stories,” The hero, Haroun, comes back home with a few elixirs. He returns to the ordinary world as a more mature, and independent person, he also returns home with a better understanding of the power of words and stories and of the power of friends and allies. One elixir Haroun comes home with is that he returned as a young adult and becomes more independent.

During a hero’s adventure, the hero would always meet some allies. If s/he hadn’t met them, s/he would have not continue his/her journey any longer. Same thing in Haroun’s case, if he hadn’t met his allies, he would have not found the ultimate solution to his problem. The first ally who helped Haroun a great deal is Butt the Coach Driver/Butt the Hoopoe. In both the ordinary world and the extraordinary world, he helps Haroun a great deal. Butt is like Haroun’s mentor and gives him advice countless of times. One example of this happening was when he tells Haroun, “Need’s a slippery snake...a funny fish: it makes people untruthful. They all suffer from it, but they will not always admit.” (36). He tells Haroun that there’s a difference between “need” and “want,” and Haroun acknowledges that advice near the end of the story when he said that “the way things are just now [he] honestly [doesn’t] need to go anywhere at all” (211). They’re also four other allies, they’re Iff the Water Genie, Mali the Floating Gardener, and Bagha and Goopy. They are the type of allies who does small tasks to help the hero, but the tasks did great things nonetheless. For example, when Haroun and Iff the Water Genie were trapped in the Khattam-Shud’s ship, Iff gave Haroun a Bite-a-Lite. With the Bite-a-Lite, Haroun was able to create a distraction and steal the diving suit to stop the Story Source from getting plugged in. Without the distraction, the sea of stories would’ve been poisoned severely. Another example was when Mali the Floating Gardener and Bagha and Goopy helped Haroun and Butt the Hoopoe by pushing them across the sea to the coastline of the Land of Chup. Another reason why Haroun gets the understanding of the power of friends and allies was the celebration of his birthday. His friends and allies put together a wonderful surprise birthday party just for him. His