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| Understanding Structure in Narrative:
Plot
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According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the 16th Century the word plot came to mean not simply a plot of ground or a scheme to do something, but rather a plan for a work of literature, prose or poetry. It came to be associated with plans for prose fiction and is still used in that sense today. A writer might be say he is busy plotting his novel, for example. Plot then can be thought about in terms of "structuring." Structure implies a selection and arrangement of events. Thus in analyzing plots we ask, "why these events and not others" and "why this arrangement and not another." Sometimes this is discussed by first distinguishing between "story" ("the imaginary people, places, chronologically arranged events that we assume exist in the world of the author's imagination, a world from which he or she chooses and arranges or rearranges the story elements"), and "discourse" or the actual ordering which we encounter in the telling, that is, the words on the paper whether told in chronological order or not. This story/discourse distinction could be loosely diagrammed as two levels. ---------<discourse level>-----------><words-on-page> -----------<story level>-------------><imagined> One assumption of this idea is that the story can take different forms on the discourse level which seems to me to be nothing more complex than the idea that we can tell a story different ways. Let's use Chopin's The Story of an Hour <http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/chopin.html> to look closely at the idea of structure and its relationship to selection for and arrangement on the discourse or discursive level as the events from the story level are made manifest. Stop here and go read the Chopin story if you have not done so; this will ruin it for you if you don't. First, what events are presented in the discourse? Here is a list of twenty events. (Note: they all involve actions. That's the simplest idea of what is meant by event.) Different readers might make different lists but this list will do. It is presented in exactly the order of presentation but each in the present tense. (All events happen in the present.) Notice that I do not infer any events but merely report what is said in the text.
I am sure you notice that these 20 events are not in chronological order, though they are in the order of delivery to us in the discourse: #2, #11, and #15 are out of chronological order, all happening before her sister told her of the death. This out-of-chronological-order quality is partly what is meant by structure. When events are shifted in the telling from what they were on the story level, they are being structured. A simple cause/effect sentence can illustrate this. The hangover was the result of drinking too much. Well, the order of the words puts the drinking second while we all know it must have come first in the "history." So structuring partly means telling events out of their order of occurrence. It also means choosing to leave some events out, while putting others in. That is the second principle: selection. The author chooses from the topos or terrain of his imaginary world's history the events to tell. Here's an example: We can guess that at about the same time when Mrs. Mallard was going up to her room, Mr. Mallard was getting off the train and walking home. This is clearly part of the "story" of events. But the writer/narrator chooses to leave that out. And we know why. She wants us to be as surprised as Mrs. Mallard when he shows up. Story tellers withhold all the time events that are crucial for surprise. Here's another: What did they have for breakfast that morning? The writer also leaves that out. We might judge it is unnecessary information, but it is only the sense of "plot" coherence that tells us that. What did they say over the breakfast table? Was that when Mrs. Mallard was "loving" of Mr. Mallard? Or was she "shuddering" at the prospect of a long life, we assume, with him. That might have fit the development of this plot, but the author did not select it for inclusion. The principle of selection or choice is the second aspect of structure. So, structure is made up of selecting and ordering events for the telling. We can now ask, why, concerning these decisions. Why did the writer/narrator include (select) the details of Richard getting the message at a newspaper office and then checking it with a telegram? Moreover, why was it told out of order? What purpose do these details of plot selection and ordering serve? Perhaps we can answer this by asking what effect these details at this moment in the discourse have on us. They had no effect on Mrs. Mallard or Josephine since apparently they don't know where he saw the first telegram or how then he checked the facts with the second one. Why a newspaper office and why did he re-check? It seems he wanted to be positive of the event before he told them. And when we (the readers) are made aware of this, we accept its validity just as he did. That tiny detail lessens our suspicion, which otherwise might likely be stimulated by the opening death message--"oh yeah, the old surprise, return-from-the-grave, plot trick." That is an example of Chopin using a plot detail to help set us up for the surprise ending. And so, if we place events first on the discourse line, in the order they are told, we can then compare them to the story line which should contain both the events told out of order and the untold (necessary) events in the order of occurrence. The story line can include events which are inferred such as Mr. Mallard getting off the train and walking home. (When events from the "story" are imagined, the reader is filling Gaps in the text. Not everyone fills in gaps the same way, though what we are free to imagine is often constrained by other information in the text or by our sense of how unfair it is to take over a story and mentally rewrite it. For example, it would be unfair and unsatisfying to say Mr. Mallard was, say, having an affair. Yet, he might have taken a cab home or hitched a ride on a milk wagon.)
Doing this diagram of both discourse order and history order is a great way to start analyzing plot! If you agree, try analyzing a plot's chronology as I did for Chopin's story.
2. Traditional Dramatic Plot Structure Diagrams Once we are sure of the "history" and how events from it have been selected and ordered in the telling, we can look also at the more traditional ideas of plot structure such as the attribution of terms like "exposition" or "rising action" or "climax" to specific moments or events in a story. From Aristotle's Poetics onward, narratives have been discussed in terms of plot structure inferred from Aristotle's description of the ideal tragedy. Barbara McManus has presented online a fine summary and review of Aristotle's observations <http://www.cnr.edu/home/bmcmanus/poetics.html>. Included in her work is a link to a famous formulation of Aristotle's ideas by Gustav Freytag (in Technik des Dramas 1863) in diagramatic form, well known as Freytag's Triangle or Pyramid. Here is a link to McManus's image of the Triangle <http://www.cnr.edu/home/bmcmanus/freytag.html>. I am sure you have seen it before. For our analysis, fortunately, we
have a short story which has simple action that happens to physically
imitate the diagram. Could it be that "The Story of an Hour"
is paradigmatic of the structure Aristotle and Freytag make so normative?
Could this diagram literally apply to the movements of our protagonist?
(Forgive me if I give the quite incorrect impression that there are two staircases--which this diagram suggests.) I have asked students to determine what they thought was the "climax" of the story and, inevitably, students split between the moment when she utters "free, free, free" and the moment when the door opens and Brently Mallard enters with her death ensuing. Of course, the reader is shocked as well. One might think that shock or strong reader reaction to a dramatic or violent event is automatically indicative of the climax. Other than the seduction of the fact that the story moves up to a room and then down again, suggesting the apex of the action is at the apex of the stairs, in the "third act" so to speak, what justifies saying that possibly overlooked moment of her utterance is the climax of the story? A climax is a turning point which resolves in some manner and makes inevitable the ultimate outcome of the story, though it is not itself the outcome. Here we have a clue in what we determine to be the conflict of the story. Clearly what perplexes and complicates her (and the actions of those around her) is the course of her reaction to the news. All around her fear for her life. They try to protect her from shock and worry about the effects of her grief. She herself worries also but gradually more about the growing presence of future than the absence of her husband. If complication is much like tension (or suspense) in the protagonist and in the reader, then the climax is the moment of relaxation for her: "Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body." Her heart, rather than kill her with tension at this moment, seems to work therapeutically. Is it "monstrous joy" the narrator asks? And with this word, this moment is tied to the outcome, the catastrophe, but not in the way that all around her assume. We know, for better or worse, she is a changed person through her recognition--a change that would change her life whether Mallard returns home or not. Perhaps Chopin read her Aristotle or even her Freytag. 3. Plot Patterns and Reoccurrence A third way to analyze plot structure is to look at any patterns in incidents and events. In James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" a young man comes to see Sonny's brother in the first section of the story. The narrator brother's treatment of Sonny is hinted at in his treatment of the friend. He refuses to listen to him at first. This echos what we find out in a flash back, was his treatment of Sonny. Comparing and contrasting plot events is an interesting way to investigate structure in stories (or incidents in stories) since it is clearly an example of selection and arrangement on the part of the teller. Many plots involve reoccurrence. Like the series of chases which repeat in significant ways in "Most Dangerous Game," or the history of the barn burning episodes in "Barn Burning," or Bartleby's pattern of refusing in "Bartleby the Scrivener," or Young Goodman Browns repeated attempts to stop going further into the woods, repetition sets up divergence. A pattern can be set up to be broken in a significant way. The patterns can also be less than obvious. Think about similarities in any at-first-glance different events. Does that shed any light on a story? Sometimes discourse repeats by retellling events that happen only once in the "story" world. An example of this occurs in Joyce Carol Oates' "The Lady with the Pet Dog." In our story of an hour above, there is repetition of the simplest sort in the motion of withrawal and then return. This establishes the symmetry which the Artisotelian plot structure demands. 4. Bad Plots If authors are bad at structuring plots, they will get things out of order or introduce things they forget about later. Thank goodness that does not happen in good literature very often. If authors are not very imaginative, they rely on conventional or formula plots which tell the writer how events are to evolve without him or her having to imagine new turns. There is a long tradition of relying on conventional and predictable patterns of events. As you know, popular entertainment is full of this sort of plot. One way to analyze a plot's structure is to compare it to common, conventional, or, we might even say formula plots. Does it differ from these expected shapes? How? A plot filled with the unexpected can be one criteria for excellence in a story. You will want to keep this possibility in mind as something to pursue for a longer paper. For more on how one might anaylze
a plot by comparing and contrasting it with conventional plots, see More
below for Internet explorations of
formula plots.
Here is a mix of links relating to narrative, plot and plot analysis. Formula Plots The following links all relate to formula plots. Investigate what I have found and consider researching even more: add links to the probe by emailing any you find to me.
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