"Two Sides of the Same Magic": The Dialectic of Mortality and Immortality in Peter S. Beagle's the Last Unicorn (Critical Essay)

FORTY YEARS AFTER ITS INITIAL PUBLICATION IN 1968, Peter S. Beagle's masterful novel The Last Unicorn remains one of the most endearing and enduring mythopoeic works of the twentieth century. The novel follows the journey of a unicorn searching for her people, who have apparently been taken by a certain Red Bull of King Haggard. Along the way to Haggard's territory, the unicorn is joined by Schmendrick, a bumbling magician working for a witch's sideshow, and Molly Grue, the ex-girlfriend of a Robin Hood-wannabe. The unicorn is almost defeated by the Bull in their first encounter, but Schmendrick saves her by transforming her into a human woman, whom they call the Lady Amalthea. Together the three enter Haggard's castle to find the Bull again, while Haggard's adopted son Lir (1) falls in love with Amalthea. The novel ends as Amalthea once again becomes a unicorn, but now possessing the character to vanquish the Bull and free her people. Beyond its popularity among general readers, the novel has also attracted more attention among literary critics than is common for a fantasy during its author's lifetime. One such critic is Alexandra Hennessey Olson, who argues that Beagle mimics the prose-poetry structure of Boethius's sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy, yet does so to propose an alternate consolation. Indeed, "Beagle's message is the opposite of that taught by Philosophy" (143). Rather than extolling an immutable, immortal ideal, Olson asserts that The Last Unicorn's message is that "[a] person can be happy only when he accepts mortality and his limitations and does not long for an immutable world" (143). I believe that the first half of Olson's claim is consistently borne out in the novel. However, her final statement that "immortality is a curse, or a shroud" (143), while accurate to an extent, misses the overall complexity of Beagle's work. Other critics have touched upon the relationship between mortality and immortality in the novel.