Psychic Transformation and the Regeneration of Language in Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn

Critical opinion about Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn (1968) remains sharply divided: there are those who deem the work a minor masterpiece and those who find it simplistic and severely flawed. The overwhelmingly positive audience response to The Last Unicorn, however, indicates that what appears to be a simple story is actually a complex revisioning of the fairy tale. This essay investigates The Last Unicorn as a self-reflexive symbolic narrative that is as much concerned with the regeneration of meaningful language as it is with the process of psychic transformation.