TH E N O RTO N I NTRO DUC TIO N TO
Literature
SHORTER THIRTEENTH EDITION
Kelly J. Mays
U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E VA D A , L A S V E G A S
B
W. W. N O R TO N & CO M PA N Y
N e w Yo r k , L o n d o n
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Understanding the Text
2 PLOT
At its most basic, every story is an attempt to answer the question What hap-
pened? In some cases, this question is easy to answer. J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord
of the Rings trilogy (1954–55) is full of battles, chases, and other heart-stopping
dramatic action; Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) relates Huck
and Jim’s adventures as they travel down the Mississippi River. Yet if we ask what
happens in other works of fiction, our initial answer might well be “Not much.” In
one of the most pivotal scenes in Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady (1881),
for example, a woman enters a room, sees a man sitting down and a woman stand-
ing up, and beats a hasty retreat. Not terribly exciting stuff, it would seem. Yet this
event ends up radically transforming the lives of just about everyone in the novel.
“On very tiny pivots do human lives turn” would thus seem to be one common
message—or theme—of fiction.
All fiction, regardless of its subject matter, should make us ask, What will hap-
pen next? and How will all this turn out? And responsive readers of fiction will
often pause to answer those questions, trying to articulate what their expectations
are and how the story has shaped them. But great fiction and responsive readers
are often just as interested in questions about why things happen and about how
the characters’ lives are affected as a result. These how and why questions are
likely to be answered very differently by different readers of the very same fictional
work; as a result, such questions will often generate powerful essays, whereas
mainly factual questions about what happens in the work usually won’t.
PLOT V E R S U S AC T I O N , S EQ U E N CE , A N D S U B PLOT
The term plot is sometimes used to refer to the events recounted in a fictional
work. But in this book we instead use the term action in this way, reserving the
term plot for the way the author sequences and paces the events so as to shape our
response and interpretation.
The difference between action and plot resembles the difference between ancient
chronicles that merely list the events of a king’s reign in chronological order and
more modern histories that make a meaningful sequence out of those events. As the
British novelist and critic E. M. Forster put it, “The king died and then the queen
died” is not a plot, for it has not been “tampered with.” “The queen died after the
king died” describes the same events, but the order in which they are reported has
been changed. The reader of the first sentence focuses on the king first, the reader
of the second on the queen. The second sentence, moreover, subtly encourages us to
speculate about why things happened, not just what happened and when: Did the
queen die because her husband did? If so, was her death the result of her grief? Or
was she murdered by a rival who saw the king’s death as the perfect opportunity to
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76 CH. 2 | PLOT
get rid of her, too? Though our two sentences describe the same action, each has
quite a different focus, emphasis, effect, and meaning thanks to its sequencing—
the precise order in which events are related.
Like chronicles, many fictional works do relate events in chronological order,
starting with the earliest and ending with the latest. Folktales, for example, have this
sort of plot. But fiction writers have other choices; events need not be recounted in
the order in which they happened. Quite often, then, a writer will choose to mix
things up, perhaps opening a story with the most recent event and then moving back-
ward to show us all that led up to it. Still other stories begin somewhere in the middle
of the action or, to use the Latin term, in medias res (literally, “in the middle of
things”). In such plots, events that occurred before the story’s opening are sometimes
presented in flashbacks. Conversely, a story might jump forward in time to recount
a later episode or event in a flashforward. Foreshadowing occurs when an author
merely gives subtle clues or hints about what will happen later in the story.
Though we often talk about the plot of a fictional work, however, keep in mind
that some works, especially longer ones, have two or more. A plot that receives
significantly less time and attention than another is called a subplot.
PACE
In life, we sometimes have little choice about how long a particular event lasts. If
you want a driver’s license, you may have to spend a boring hour or two at the
motor vehicle office. And much as you might prefer to relax and enjoy your lunch,
occasionally you have to scarf it down during your drive to campus.
One of the pleasures of turning experiences into a story, however, is that doing
so gives a writer more power over them. In addition to choosing the order in which
to recount events, the writer can also decide how much time and attention to
devote to each. Pacing, or the duration of particular episodes—especially relative
to each other and to the time they would take in real life—is a vital tool of story-
tellers and another important factor to consider in analyzing plots. In all fiction,
pace as much as sequence determines focus and emphasis, effect and meaning.
And though it can be very helpful to differentiate between “fast-paced” and “slow-
paced” fiction, all effective stories contain both faster and slower bits. When an
author slows down to home in on a particular moment and scene, often intro-
duced by a phrase such as “Later that evening” or “The day before Maggie fell
down,” we call this a discriminated occasion. For example, the first paragraph of
Linda Brewer’s 20/20 quickly and generally refers to events that occur over three
days. Then Brewer suddenly slows down, pinpointing an incident that takes place
on “[t]he third evening out.” That episode or discriminated occasion consumes
four paragraphs of the story, even though the action described in those paragraphs
accounts for only a few minutes of Bill and Ruthie’s time. Next the story devotes
two more paragraphs to an incident that occurs “[t]he next evening.” In the last
paragraph, Brewer speeds up again, telling us about the series of “wonderful
sights” Ruthie sees between Indiana and Spokane, Washington.
CO N F L I C T S
Whatever their sequence and pace, all plots hinge on at least one conflict—some
sort of struggle—and its resolution. Conflicts may be external or internal. External
conflicts arise between characters and something or someone outside themselves.
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Jacob a nd W ilhelm Grimm The Shroud 77
Adventure stories and action films often present this sort of conflict in its purest
form, keeping us poised on the edge of our seats as James Bond or Jason Bourne
struggles to outwit and outfight an arch v illain intent on world domination or
destruction. Yet external conflicts can also be much subtler, pitting an individual
against nature or fate, against a social force such as racism or poverty, or against
another person or group of people with a different way of looking at things (as in
“20/20”). The cartoon below presents an external conflict of the latter type and one
you may well see quite differently than the cartoonist does. How would you articu-
late that conflict?
Internal conflicts occur when a character struggles to reconcile two competing
desires, needs, or duties, or two parts or aspects of himself: His head, for instance,
might tell him to do one thing, his heart another.
Often, a conflict is simultaneously external and internal, as in the following
brief folktale, in which a woman seems to struggle simultaneously with nature,
with mortality, with God, and with her desire to hold on to someone she loves
versus her need to let go.
JACOB AND WILHELM GRIMM
The Shroud
T here was once a mother who had a little boy of seven years old, who was so
handsome and lovable that no one could look at him without liking him, and
she herself worshipped him above everything in the world. Now it so happened
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78 CH. 2 | PLOT
that he suddenly became ill, and God took him to himself; and for this the
mother could not be comforted, and wept both day and night. But soon after-
wards, when the child had been buried, it appeared by night in the places
where it had sat and played during its life, and if the mother wept, it wept
also, and, when morning came, it disappeared. As, however, the mother would
not stop crying, it came one night, in the little white shroud in which it had
been laid in its coffin, and with its wreath of flowers round its head, and stood
on the bed at her feet, and said, “Oh, mother, do stop crying, or I shall never
fall asleep in my coffin, for my shroud will not dry because of all thy tears
which fall upon it.” The mother was afraid when she heard that, and wept no
more. The next night the child came again, and held a little light in its hand,
and said, “Look, mother, my shroud is nearly dry, and I can rest in my grave.”
Then the mother gave her sorrow into God’s keeping, and bore it quietly and
patiently, and the child came no more, but slept in its little bed beneath the
earth.
1812
• • •
T H E F IV E PA RT S O F PLOT
Even compact and simple plots, like that of The Shroud, have the same five parts
or phases as lengthy and complex plots: (1) exposition, (2) rising action, (3) climax
or turning point, (4) falling action, and (5) conclusion or resolution. The following
diagram, named Freytag’s pyramid after the nineteenth-century German scholar
Gustav Freytag, maps out a typical plot structure:
climax
fa
n
tio
llin
ac
g
ac
ing
tio
ris
exposition conclusion
inciting incident resolution
Freytag’s Pyramid
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PLOT 79
Exposition
The first part of the plot, called the exposition, introduces the characters, their
situations, and, usually, a time and place, giving us all the basic, background infor-
mation we need to understand what is to come. In longer works of fiction, exposi-
tion may go on for paragraphs or even pages, and some exposition may well be
deferred until later phases of the plot. But in our examples, the exposition is all
up-f ront and brief: Trudeau’s first panel shows us a teacher (or at least his words), a
group of students, and a classroom; the Grimms’ first sentence introduces a
mother, her young son, and the powerful love she feels for him.
Exposition usually reveals some source or seed of potential conflict in the ini-
tial situation, of which the characters may be as yet unaware. In Trudeau’s cartoon,
the contrast between the talkative teacher, who expects “independent thought”
from those in his class, and the silent, scribbling students suggests a conflict in
the making. So, too, does the Grimms’ statement that the mother “worshipped” her
boy “above everything” else in a world in which nothing and no one lasts forever.
Rising Action
By suggesting a conflict, exposition may blend into the second phase of the plot,
the rising action, which begins with an inciting incident or destabilizing event—
that is, some action that destabilizes the initial situation and incites open conflict,
as does the death of the little boy in the second sentence of “The Shroud.” Typically,
what keeps the action rising is a complication, an event that introduces a new
conflict or intensifies an existing one. This happens in the third sentence of “The
Shroud,” when the mother begins to see her little boy every night, although he is
dead and buried.
Climax or Turning Point
The plot’s climax or turning point is the moment of greatest emotional intensity.
(Notice the way boldface lettering appears and exclamation points replace ques-
tion marks in the second-to-last panel of the Doonesbury strip.) The climax is also
the moment when the outcome of the plot and the fate of the characters are
decided. (A climax thus tends to be a literally pivotal incident that “turns things
around,” or involves, in Aristotle’s words, “the change from one state of things [. . .]
to its opposite.”) “The Shroud” reaches its climax when the mother stops crying
after her little boy tells her that her grief is what keeps him from sleeping and that
peaceful sleep is what he craves.
Here, as in many plots, the turning point involves a discovery or new insight or
even an epiphany, a sudden revelation of truth inspired by a seemingly trivial event.
As a result, turning points often involve internal or psychological events, even if
they are prompted by, and lead to, external action. In “The Shroud,” for instance,
the mother’s new insight results in different behavior: She “wept no more.”
Sometimes, though, critics differentiate between the story’s climax and the
crisis that precedes and precipitates it. In “The Shroud,” for example, these critics
would describe the crisis as the moment when the son confronts the mother with
information that implicitly requires her to make a choice, the climax as the
moment when she makes it. This distinction might be especially helpful when you
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80 CH. 2 | PLOT
grapple with longer works of fiction in which much more time and action inter-
venes between crisis and climax.
Falling Action
The falling action brings a release of emotional tension and moves us toward the
resolution of the conflict(s). This release occurs in “The Shroud” when the boy
speaks for the second and last time, assuring his mother that her more peaceful
demeanor is giving him peace as well.
In some works of fiction, resolution is achieved through an utterly unexpected
twist, as in “Meanwhile, unknown to our hero, the marines were just on the other
side of the hill,” or “Susan rolled over in bed and realized the whole thing had
been just a dream.” Such a device is sometimes called a deus ex machina. (This
Latin term literally means “god out of the machine” and derives from the ancient
theatrical practice of using a machine to lower onto the stage a god who solves the
problems of the human characters.)
Conclusion
Finally, just as a plot begins with a situation that is later destabilized, so its con-
clusion presents us with a new and at least somewhat stable situation—one that
gives a sense of closure because the conflicts have been resolved, if only temporar-
ily and not necessarily in the way we or the characters had expected. In “The
Shroud,” that resolution comes in the last sentence, in which the mother bears her
grief “quietly and patiently” and the child peacefully sleeps his last sleep. The final
Doonesbury panel presents us with a situation that is essentially the reverse of the
one with which the strip begins— w ith the teacher silently slumped over his
podium, his students suddenly talking to each other instead of scribbling down
his words. Many plots instead end with a situation that outwardly looks almost
identical to the one with which they began. But thanks to all that has happened
between the story’s beginning and its end, the final “steady state” at which the
characters arrive can never be exactly the same as the one in which they started.
A key question to ask at the end of a work of fiction is precisely why, as well as
how, things are different.
Some fictional works may also include a final section called an epilogue, which
ties up loose ends left dangling in the conclusion proper, updates us on what has
happened to the characters since their conflicts were resolved, and/or provides
some sort of commentary on the story’s larger significance. (An epilogue is thus a
little like this paragraph, which comes after we have concluded our discussion of
the five phases of plot but still feel that there is one more term to deal with.)
A Note on Dénouement
In discussions of plot, you will very often encounter the French word dénoue-
ment (literally, “untying,” as of a knot). In this anthology, however, we generally
try to avoid using dénouement because it tends to be used in three different,
potentially contradictory ways—as a synonym for falling action; as a synonym for
conclusion or resolution; and even as a label for a certain kind of epilogue.
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