Portals and Possibilities

A PORTAL IS a doorway between two worlds—one real and one magical—and going through the portal is a way of leaving the real world behind, if only for a little while. There are countless examples in literature: the wardrobe that transports the Pevensie children from war-torn England to the magical world of Narnia, the rabbit hole Alice falls down while following the White Rabbit to Wonderland, the tornado that sweeps Dorothy and Toto up from Kansas and deposits them in Oz. In all of these examples, characters go through the portal, explore the strange world on the other side, and come back changed (or, at the very least, with greater knowledge of themselves). This is the basic structure of the portal fantasy. Authors play with whether or not a character will return, when, and how often, but in the vast majority of examples, one key fact remains the same: a character goes through the portal. What happens, then, when one doesn’t?