Prose Fiction E-Book

Ignasi Ribó

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

This concise and highly accessible textbook outlines the principles and techniques of storytelling. It is intended as a high-school and college-level introduction to the central concepts of narrative theory – concepts that will aid students in developing their competence not only in analysing and interpreting short stories and novels, but also in writing them.

This textbook prioritises clarity over intricacy of theory, equipping its readers with the necessary tools to embark on further study of literature, literary theory and creative writing. Building on a ‘semiotic model of narrative,’ it is structured around the key elements of narratological theory, with chapters on plot, setting, characterisation, and narration, as well as on language and theme – elements which are underrepresented in existing textbooks on narrative theory. The chapter on language constitutes essential reading for those students unfamiliar with rhetoric, while the chapter on theme draws together significant perspectives from contemporary critical theory (including feminism and postcolonialism).

This textbook is engaging and easily navigable, with key concepts highlighted and clearly explained, both in the text and in a full glossary located at the end of the book. Throughout the textbook the reader is aided by diagrams, images, quotes from prominent theorists, and instructive examples from classical and popular short stories and novels (such as Jane Austen’s  Pride and Prejudice, Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis,’ J. K. Rowling’s  Harry Potter, or Dostoyevsky’s  The Brothers Karamazov, amongst many others).

Prose Fiction: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Narrative can either be incorporated as the main textbook into a wider syllabus on narrative theory and creative writing, or it can be used as a supplementary reference book for readers interested in narrative fiction. The textbook is a must-read for beginning students of narratology, especially those with no or limited prior experience in this area. It is of especial relevance to English and Humanities major students in Asia, for whom it was conceived and written.
 

Leseprobe

PROSE FICTION

Prose Fiction

An Introduction to the Semiotics of Narrative

Ignasi Ribó

https://www.openbookpublishers.com/

© 2019 Ignasi Ribó

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

Attribution should include the following information:

Ignasi Ribó, Prose Fiction: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Narrative. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2019. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0187

In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0187#copyright

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All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web

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ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-809-9

ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-810-5

ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-811-2

ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-812-9

ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-813-6

ISBN Digital (XML): 978-1-78374-814-3

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0187

Cover image: Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash at https://unsplash.com/photos/AG2Ct_DqCh0

Cover design: Anna Gatti

Contents

About the Author

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

Preface

xi

1.

Introduction

1

1.1

What Is Narrative?

2

1.2

Genres

4

1.3

Prose Fiction

6

1.4

Story and Discourse

9

1.5

Beyond Literature

11

Summary

13

References

14

2.

Plot

17

2.1

The Thread of Narrative

18

2.2

Emplotment

20

2.3

Beginnings, Middles, and Ends

22

2.4

Conflict and Resolution

26

2.5

Suspense and Surprise

29

Summary

30

References

31

3.

Setting

33

3.1

The World of Narrative

34

3.2

Topography and Atmosphere

36

3.3

Kinds of Setting

38

3.4

Description

40

3.5

Verisimilitude

42

Summary

44

References

45

4.

Characterisation

47

4.1

The Actants of Narrative

49

4.2

Individuation

50

4.3

Kinds of Character

54

4.4

Representing Characters

57

4.5

Dialogue

60

Summary

62

References

62

5.

Narration

65

5.1

The Expression of Narrative

66

5.2

Narrators and Narratees

68

5.3

Focalisation

71

5.4

Telling and Showing

74

5.5

Commentary

76

Summary

78

References

79

6.

Language

81

6.1

The Style of Narrative

82

6.2

Foregrounding

84

6.3

Figures of Speech

86

6.4

Symbolism

89

6.5

Translation

91

Summary

93

References

93

7.

Theme

95

7.1

The Meaning of Narrative

96

7.2

Identity

98

7.3

Ideology

101

7.4

Morality

103

7.5

Art and Politics

105

Summary

106

References

107

Bibliography

109

Illustrations

113

Examples of Short Stories and Novels

119

Glossary of Narrative Terms

135

About the Author

Ignasi Ribó (Ph.D. in Modern European Literature and Thought, University of Sussex) is a Catalan writer and scholar. He has been teaching Literary Theory and Semiotics at university level for more than ten years and currently works as a Lecturer in the School of Liberal Arts at Mae Fah Luang University (Chiang Rai, Thailand). Ignasi is the author of several novels, as well as academic essays on literary theory, comparative literature, ecocriticism, biosemiotics, cultural ecology, and environmental philosophy. More information on the author’s website: https://www.ignasiribo.com

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the School of Liberal Arts at Mae Fah Luang University (MFU) for giving me the opportunity to teach the ‘Short Stories and Novels’ course to English-major third-year students. This textbook was specifically written for this course and would probably have never seen the light of day, at least in this form, if I had not been assigned this task.

In particular, I would like to thank the coordinator of the course, Ajarn Teeranuch Anurit, as well as Ajarn Panida Monyanont and Ajarn Khanisara Sirisit, who taught this and other literary courses with me at MFU. It was an enjoyable and rewarding experience being part of this literature team.

I would also like to thank my English major students, who mostly came from Thailand, but in some cases also from Korea, Japan, China, Bhutan, and Myanmar, for their interest and willingness to learn the basics of narrative theory, especially considering that most of them had limited experience in literary studies before attending MFU. This book was written for them and for many other students like them who might be interested in studying this subject elsewhere.

I also want to thank the anonymous reviewers who contributed to improving the quality of the book with their insightful comments and suggestions during the peer review process.

Finally, I would like to thank Alessandra Tosi and the editorial team at Open Book Publishers for believing in this textbook and making it available to readers and students around the world. At a time when the publishing industry tends to look at its bottom line more than at the lines it prints, it is a truly commendable enterprise to produce high-quality academic books that can be accessed, read and used by everyone free of charge.

Preface

© Ignasi Ribó, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0187.08

This book is a college-level introduction to the concepts of narrative theory (or narratology) that students need in order to develop their competence in analysing, interpreting and writing prose fiction.

The book has been conceived and written for undergraduate students majoring in English literature and language, as well as in other disciplines of the Humanities, in Asia. In general, Asian students have only had a limited exposure to Western literature and literary theories during their high-school education. The book aims to provide an easy-to-follow introduction for these students, giving them the tools to read and engage in critical discussion of narrative texts without burdening them with excessive historical or theoretical details. The book should also be useful to Western students, either at high-school or college-level, as well as to general readers interested in learning more about the literary devices used in narrative texts, particularly in prose fiction genres such as short stories and novels.

Prose Fiction presents the most important concepts of narratology in a rigorous but accessible way. It follows a semiotic model of narrative communication, which is based on the most recent literary theory, but avoids engaging in overtly technical debates. By using simple language and relying on many examples drawn from a wide range of short stories and novels, some of them well-known to students, the book allows them to develop a thorough understanding of the key elements of narrative.

This material is intended to be used as the main textbook in a syllabus that would also include a selection of readings, and in-class interpretation and discussion of stories drawn from a variety of authors, genres and periods. It can also be used as a supplementary textbook in creative writing courses, especially those focused on narrative fiction.

The book begins by introducing the ‘semiotic model of narrative,’ which incorporates key elements of narratological theory into a single coherent framework. The different elements of this framework are then developed in subsequent chapters. This structure allows the student to progressively develop a comprehensive understanding of narrative without getting lost in the intricacies of theory.

The initial chapters on plot, setting and characterisation are particularly important for a narratological analysis of stories. They constitute the most accessible part of the book, providing plenty of examples that allow students to better understand the key concepts presented. More challenging, but also important from a narratological perspective, is the chapter on narration. The following two chapters, on language and theme, are not usually covered so extensively by most textbooks on narrative. The chapter on language explores figurative devices generally used in prose fiction, and is particularly useful for students who are not familiar with rhetoric. Finally, the chapter on theme incorporates perspectives drawn from contemporary critical theory (feminism, postcolonialism, etc.) that are not generally discussed in similar textbooks but constitute an essential aspect of contemporary literary criticism.

The language used in the book is purposely simple and accessible to undergraduate students without previous knowledge of literature. Key concepts are defined in the glossary at the end of the book. Throughout the text, an effort is made to systematically classify and structure the different elements of narrative in ways that facilitate understanding and retention by students.

I have purposefully avoided giving specific text samples or readings, because I believe that instructors should feel free to design their own reading list, based on their own interests and knowledge, as well as on their students’ preferences and the context of their teaching. I see this textbook as a bare-bones presentation of narrative theory. The book provides a conceptual skeleton, allowing teachers to decide what flesh they want to add, in order to construct a working model for an effective course on the anatomy of fiction.

Given the abstract nature of many of the concepts discussed, I have tried to provide examples throughout the book. These examples are not developed in detail and are solely used to illustrate key concepts and make them easier to understand for students. They also aim to provide a sense of the diversity, complexity and excitement of fiction narratives. While the examples are drawn from a wide variety of short stories and novels, including both classical and popular fiction from different languages and cultures, most of the texts were originally written in English. This predominance of English (or rather, English-language) literature can be explained in part because the textbook was originally written for students majoring in English language and literature. But it also reflects the current status of English as the preeminent global language, a fact which necessarily affects the international projection of its literature. Coming from a country whose language and culture have been historically minoritised, I am nonetheless quite sensitive to the negative consequences that derive from the supremacy of the English language. Thus, I have tried my best to expand the cultural range of examples in order to reflect the rich diversity of world literature.

However, I am not entirely sure if I have succeeded in this effort, and most likely my explanations and examples are too heavily determined by the European tradition, which is, after all, my own. In any case, at the end of the book, I have provided a short summary and contextualisation of all the stories that I use as examples. Each entry also includes a link to additional sources of information (i.e., Wikipedia), in order to guide students in their own exploration of the literary canon beyond the formal classroom reading list.

While the textbook necessarily reflects my own biases and shortcomings, I hope that it will spark the interest of students in literary narratives, encouraging them to read more, but above all, to read more critically.

Chiang Rai, 1 October 2019

1. Introduction

© Ignasi Ribó, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0187.01

In one form or another, stories are part of everyone’s lives. We are constantly telling each other stories, usually about events that happen to us or to people we know. These are usually not invented stories, but they are stories nonetheless. And we would not be able to make sense of our world and our lives without them.

We also enjoy reading, watching, or listening to stories that we know are not true, but whose characters, places, and events spark our imagination and allow us to experience different worlds as if they were our own. These are the kind of stories we call ‘fiction.’ Many people like to watch series or soap operas on TV. And even more people like to watch movies, whether in the cinema or streamed to their laptop or smartphone. Video games, comics and manga, songs and musicals, stage plays, and YouTube blogs, they all tell stories in their own ways. But if there is one medium that has shown itself particularly well-suited to tell engaging and lasting stories throughout the ages, it is written language. It is fair to say, then, that stories, and most particularly fictions, in their various forms and genres, constitute the backbone of literature.

In this chapter, we will introduce some basic ideas about storytelling, and in particular about the narrative forms of literature and the ways in which they create meaning. We will also present the main genres into which literary narratives have been divided historically, and how these genres have evolved from their origins until today. We will then try to define and frame the two genres of prose fiction that are more common nowadays and from which we will draw the examples in this textbook: short stories and novels.

Not everyone approaches these genres in the same way. Here, we will follow a semiotic model to study and interpret narrative structure and meaning. In order to understand this model, it is essential to grasp the distinction between story and discourse, which will guide our discussions throughout the book. To conclude this chapter, we will consider how short stories and novels spread beyond the written word and become interconnected with other media in contemporary culture.

1.1 What Is Narrative?

Narrative is notoriously difficult to define with precision. But even before we attempt a working definition of the concept, we already know that it refers to storytelling. The term itself comes from the Latin word narro, which means ‘to tell.’ In English, to narrate means to tell a story. According to many anthropologists, this ability is universal amongst human beings.1 All peoples, everywhere and throughout history, tell each other stories, or, as they are technically called, narratives. As the semiotician and literary critic Roland Barthes once wrote,

The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances — as though any material were fit to receive man’s stories. Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting, stained-glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there has never been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives, enjoyment of which is very often shared by men with different, even opposing, cultural backgrounds. Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.2

For the purpose of this book, we will define narrative as the semiotic representation of a sequence of events, meaningfully connected by time and cause.3 This definition highlights certain key elements shared by all forms of narrative:

Narratives are semiotic representations, that is, they are made of material signs (written or spoken words, moving or still images, etc.) which convey or stand for meanings that need to be decoded or interpreted by the receiver.Narratives present a sequence of events, that is, they connect at least two events (actions, happenings, incidents, etc.) in a common structure or organised whole.Narratives connect events by time and cause, that is, they organise the sequence of events based on their relationship in time (‘Hear the sweet cuckoo. Through the big-bamboo thicket, the full moon filters.’4), as cause and effect (‘Into the old pond, a frog suddenly plunges. The sound of water.’5), or, in most narratives, by both temporal and causal relationships.Narratives are meaningful, that is, they have meaning for both senders and receivers, although these meanings do not need to be the same.

As this definition suggests, narrative is the fundamental way in which we humans make sense of our existence. Without effort, we connect everything that happens in our lifeworld (events) as a temporal or causal sequence, and most often as both. In order to understand our lives and the world around us, we need to tell ourselves and each other meaningful stories. Even our perception of things that appear to be static inevitably involves making up stories.6 Are you able to look at the picture in Figure 1.1 below without seeing a connected sequence of events, a narrative, in it?

Fig. 1.1 Collision of Costa Concordia, cropped (2012). By Roberto Vongher, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Collision_of_Costa_Concordia_5_crop.jpg

1.2 Genres

Genres are conventional groupings of texts (or other semiotic representations) based on certain shared features. These groupings, which have been used since ancient times by writers, readers, and critics, serve a variety of functions:

Classification: By identifying the features that are worthy of attention, genres help us to place a particular text among similar texts and distinguish it from most other texts.Prescription: Genres institute standards and rules that guide writers in their work. Sometimes these rules are actively enforced (normative genres), while at other times they act simply as established customs.Interpretation: These same standards and rules help readers to interpret texts, by providing them with shared conventions and expectations about the different texts they might encounter. Evaluation: Critics also use these standards and rules when they set about judging the artistic quality of a text, by comparing it with other texts in the same genre.

Already in Ancient Greece and Rome, narrative was a major literary genre (epic), distinct from poetic song (lyric) and stage performance (drama). Other generic classifications, particularly those related to the content of the story (tragedy, comedy, pastoral, satire, etc.), were also commonly used. But the basic classification of poetic forms at the time, established by Plato and Aristotle, was based on whether the poet told the story (diegesis) or the story was represented or imitated by actors (mimesis).

While Classical and Neoclassical poetics thought of genres as fixed and preordained forms that poets needed to abide by, modern literary theory, starting with the Romantic period, has come to see genres as dynamic and loosely defined conventions. Genres change and evolve through time. Different cultures define and institute different genres. In fact, modern literature has seen a significant expansion of genres, as a visit to any bookstore or online bookseller will attest (see Fig. 1.2).

Fig. 1.2 El Ateneo Gran Splendid. A theatre converted into a bookshop. Buenos Aires, Argentina. Photo by Galio, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buenos_Aires_-_Recoleta_-_El_Ateneo_ex_Grand_Splendid_2.JPG

Genres are continuously evolving across many different dimensions, such as content, style, form, etc. They are often organised at different levels of subordination, in hierarchies or taxonomies of genres and subgenres. Nowadays, for example, the following generic distinctions are commonly used to classify stories:

Fiction vs. nonfiction (based on whether the events and the characters of the story are invented or taken from reality).Prose vs. verse (based on the literary technique used to tell the story).Narrative vs. drama (based on whether the story is told or shown).Novel, novella, or short story (based on the length of the story).Adventure, fantasy, romance, humour, science-fiction, crime, etc. (based on the content of the story).

These and many other generic classifications allow us to impose some order on the vast number of stories that are published every year. But they are not set in stone and are certainly not eternal. Following the disposition of writers, readers, and critics, new genres appear and disappear, often combining the characteristics of previous texts or developing from the ambiguous boundaries of existing genres, as with the blending of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ into ‘faction’ (or nonfiction novel).7 There is little doubt that novels and short stories are the most popular narrative fiction genres in contemporary literature. Like all genres, however, they appeared at some point in history and will only last as long as people are interested in writing and reading them.

1.3 Prose Fiction

Prose is text written or spoken with the pattern of ordinary or everyday language, without a metrical structure. Verse, on the other hand, is written or spoken with an arranged metrical rhythm, and often a rhyme. While narrative fiction composed in verse was very common in the past, modern writers overwhelmingly tell their stories in prose, to the point that most readers today would be baffled if they encountered fiction written in verse.

By far, the most popular genres of prose fiction nowadays are novels and short stories. The distinction between the two is fairly simple and straightforward: short stories are short, novels are long. Any other difference that we might be able to find between these two genres of narrative is derived in one way or another from this simple fact.

But before identifying certain key differences, it is important to understand that both short stories and novels are modern narrative genres, which only emerged in their current forms during the European Renaissance.8 Of course, people had been telling each other fictional stories in other forms since much earlier and in many other places. Perhaps the two forms that had the strongest influence on the emergence of these modern genres of prose fiction were the Classical epic poems, most particularly Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and the Hebrew Bible, which is filled with a wide variety of short stories.

During the European Renaissance, these and other influences stimulated many writers to produce fictional narratives in prose using vernacular languages (instead of Latin), so that they could reach a growing audience of readers. These narratives were not intended to be read aloud, like epic poems or other forms of poetry and drama, but silently, as part of an intimate experience between the reader and the text.9 Initially, these new narratives, inspired in Middle Eastern and Indian storytelling, tended to be short and were often published as a collection, like Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353, Fig. 1.3). Contemporaries referred to them as novelle (singular, novella), which means ‘new’ in Italian and is a term still in use today to refer to short novels. From the perspective of Western culture, these early novelle are the first modern forms of prose fiction.

Fig. 1.3 Boccaccio, Decameron: ‘The Story of the Marchioness of Montferrat,’ 15th century. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Decameron_BNF_MS_Italien_63_f_22v.jpeg

A little later in the Renaissance, some authors began to extend these novelle into longer stories that occupied the whole book with the adventures of a single protagonist. In this way, what we now call the novel was born. The first modern novel, according to most, is Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605, Fig. 1.4), the tragicomic story of a deluded country squire who tries to revive the heroic lifestyle depicted in fictional books of chivalry. We should not forget, however, that long narratives, similar in many ways to modern novels, had already been written and read in different cultures throughout history. For example, Lucius Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (ca. 170), Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe (2nd century), Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji (1010), Ramon Llull’s Blanquerna (1283), or Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms (ca. 1321), amongst many others.

Fig. 1.4. Title page of the first edition of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605). Biblioteca Digital Hispánica, Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote#/media/File:El_ingenioso_hidalgo_don_Quijote_de_la_Mancha.jpg

Due to their difference in length, short stories and novels also tend to differ from each other in certain respects:

Short stories need to focus on a few characters, a limited number of environments, and just one sequence of events. They cannot afford to digress or add unnecessary complications to the plot. Density, concentration, and precision are essential elements of good short-story writing.Novels, on the other hand, can explore many different characters, environments, and events. The story can be enriched with subplots and complications that add perspective, dynamism, and interest to the novel. Characters have room to evolve and the author can introduce digressions and commentary without undermining the form. Scope, breadth, and sweep are essential elements of good novel writing.

This does not mean that the novel is better or worse than the short story. They are simply different forms of narrative, both well adapted to achieve their own purposes. While the novel can recreate a fictional world in all its complexity and vastness, the short story is able to shine a sharper light on a particular character or situation.

1.4 Story and Discourse

The systematic study of narratives in order to understand their structure (how they work) and function (what they are for) is called narratology.10 This field has developed a set of conceptual tools that allow us to discern with more clarity and precision the process through which narratives are meaningful for writers and readers. Narratology is closely linked with semiotics, the study of meaning-making processes, and in particular the use of signs and signifying systems to communicate meanings. In this sense, it is important to realise that narratological models are not so much concerned with explaining individual narratives, but rather they attempt to identify the underlying semiotic system that makes narrative production and reception possible.11

Fig. 1.5 Semiotic model of narrative. By Ignasi Ribó, CC BY.

The semiotic or communicative model of narrative that will be developed in this textbook (see Fig. 1.5) begins by distinguishing the real people who participate in the communicative act of writing and reading (the real author and the real reader) from their textual or implied counterparts.

Thus, the ‘implied author’12 is not the actual individual who wrote the book, but a projection of that individual in the book itself. For instance, Ernest Hemingway (Fig. 1.6) was born in 1899, wrote novels like The Old Man and the Sea and short stories like ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro,’ and died in 1961. When we read one of his narratives, we are not listening to him telling us a story (how could we?), but to a virtual persona to whom we can attribute a style, attitudes, and values, based on what we find in the text itself.

Similarly, although we are the actual readers, the text does not address us as particular individuals. Otherwise, every book could only have a single intended receiver and the rest of us would be eavesdroppers. But books, unlike letters, are generally addressed to an abstract or generic receiver. We can define the notion of ‘implied reader’13 as the virtual persona to whom the implied author is addressing the narrative, as can be deduced from the text itself. When anyone of us, at any time, picks up a Hemingway novel or short story and starts to read it, we are effectively stepping into the shoes of its implied reader.

Fig. 1.6 Ernest Hemingway posing for a dust-jacket photo by Lloyd Arnold for the first edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), at Sun Valley Lodge, Idaho, 1939. By Lloyd Arnold, Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ErnestHemingway.jpg

Once we move into the narrative text itself, which already contains an implied author and an implied reader, both only circumstantially related to human beings in the real world, we need to distinguish two different levels of communication: discourse and story.14

At one level, there is the message that the implied author sends to the implied reader. We will call this message ‘discourse.’ Narrative discourse is the means through which the narrative is communicated by the implied author to the implied reader. It includes elements like:

Narration (narrator and narratee, point of view, etc.)LanguageTheme

Fig. 1.7 Semiotic model of narrative shown in speech bubbles. By Ignasi Ribó, CC BY.

The content of narrative discourse is a ‘story.’ But the story is not told directly by the implied author to the implied reader. It is the narrator (a figure of discourse) who tells the story to a narratee (another figure of discourse). Sometimes, narrators and narratees are also characters in the story, but at other times they are not. Therefore, we cannot say that narrators or narratees are people, nor even characters. Both exist only in narrative discourse. The story, then, is simply what the narrator communicates to the narratee (see Fig. 1.7). It includes elements like:

Events (plot)Environments (setting)Characters (characterisation)

In the next chapters, we will examine all these elements in more detail. First, we will look at the key elements of story: plot, setting, and characterisation. Then, we will examine the key elements of discourse: narration, language, and theme. While reading these chapters it is important to keep in mind the fundamental distinction between story and discourse, without which many aspects of narrative fiction cannot be properly understood.

1.5 Beyond Literature

As we have seen, narratives are not confined to literary works. Certainly, novels and short stories have been the privileged vehicles of storytelling since the European Renaissance until the present day. But the invention of other media, such as cinema, television, or the Internet, has been rapidly changing the way people produce and consume narratives.

During the twentieth century, cinema developed into an alternative medium to tell the kind of stories that previously were the domain of novels or plays. Like novels, movies are narratives that present a sequence of events connected by time and cause. Unlike novels, however, movies are not meant to be read, but to be watched. In this sense, movies are like theatre plays: they show a performance of the events, environments, and characters of the story, rather than having a narrator convey those events, environments, and characters through words. Of course, cinema is not completely like drama, because the camera, by selecting and framing the events presented in the narrative, acts in some ways like a narrator. In fact, we may well consider cinema a new narrative form, one that draws both from the epic (prose fiction) and dramatic (stage play) genres.15

The intimate relationship between literary and cinematographic narratives is clearly shown by the fact that many movies have tried to retell the stories found in prose fiction. In general, a narrative based on a story previously presented in a different medium is called an adaptation. In some cases, prose fictions are also adaptations, for example when they take their stories from journalistic accounts, history books, or even movies. Much more common, however, is for movies to attempt to bring successful novels and short stories to the screen. For example, J. K. Rowling’s series of novels about the adventures of the young wizard Harry Potter and his friends has been adapted into popular movies by Hollywood (see Fig. 1.8). Television has also drawn many of its fictions from literary narratives. One example is the adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s series of medieval fantasy novels A Song of Ice and Fire into a successful television show, Game of Thrones.

Fig. 1.8 Warner Bros. Studio Tour London: The Making of Harry Potter. Photo by Karen Roe, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Making_of_Harry_Potter_29-05-2012_(7528990230).jpg

Adaptations are always the subject of passionate debate and controversy. Many attempts to adapt great novels to cinema or television have been negatively received by spectators, who decry the lack of respect for the original story or find the movie less engaging and pleasing than the novel. Less frequently, film adaptations are acclaimed by spectators and critics as superior to the novels or short stories that inspired them.

What most people tend to forget is that adaptations are not translations of the original works. Rather, an adaptation is always an interpretation. In the same way that two readers will never read the same novel, because their interpretation of the events, environments, and characters represented in the story will be different, an adaptation is necessarily a subjective reading of the original text. Moreover, adaptations are creative interpretations, because they produce new texts or semiotic representations (cinema, television, comic, videoclip, etc.) driven by their own artistic motivations and structural constraints.

The fact is that stories cannot be contained in any particular medium or restricted to any predetermined set of rules. Once they have been told, in whatever form or shape, and as long as people pay attention to them, they become part of our cultural makeup. People are free to read them and use them as they like, whether it is for their own private enjoyment, or to adapt, transform, and share them with others. These adaptations may try to be as faithful as possible to what the adapter thinks is the original intention of the author or the true meaning of the text. But they can also subvert those meanings through irony, humour, and commentary, like the memes that proliferate in the Internet era. At the end of the day, stories are not there to be revered and conserved in a state of purity. They constitute the fundamental means by which we humans give meaning to our world. And as such, they are always open to new interpretations.16

Summary

Narrative is the semiotic representation of a sequence of events, meaningfully connected by time and cause. Literary narratives use written language to represent the connected sequence of events.There are many ways to classify literary narratives into different genres, according, for example, to the truthfulness of the events (fiction and nonfiction), to the way the story is told (prose and verse), to the length of the story (novel and short story), or to the content of the story (adventure, science-fiction, fantasy, romance, etc.).Prose fiction is narrative written without a metrical pattern that tells an imaginary or invented story. The most common genres of prose fiction in modern literature are novels and short stories. Novels tend to be much longer than short stories.The semiotic model of narrative, developed in the field of narratology, makes a key distinction between discourse (how the narrative is conveyed from the implied author to the implied reader) and story (what the narrator tells the narratee).Prose fictions are part of the manifold narratives that we humans use to communicate relevant meanings to each other through a wide variety of media, such as film, television, comics, etc.

References

Abbott, H. Porter, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511816932

Bal, Mieke, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto, CA: University of Toronto Press, 2017).

Barthes, Roland, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,’ in A Roland Barthes Reader, ed. by Susan Sontag, trans. by Stephen Heath (London, UK: Vintage, 1994), pp. 251–95.

Bascom, William, ‘The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives,’ The Journal of American Folklore, 78:307 (1965), 3–20.

Booth, Wayne C., The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

Buchanan, Daniel Crump, One Hundred Famous Haiku (Tokyo: Japan Publications, 1973).

Burroway, Janet, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226616728.001.0001

Chatman, Seymour Benjamin, Reading Narrative Fiction (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1993).

Chatman, Seymour Benjamin, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).

Cobley, Paul, Narrative (London, UK: Routledge, 2014).

Eco, Umberto, The Open Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

Herman, David, Basic Elements of Narrative (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444305920

Iser, Wolfgang, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

Johansen, Jørgen Dines, Literary Discourse: A Semiotic-Pragmatic Approach to Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442676725

Lodge, David, The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts (New York, NY: Viking, 1993).

Manguel, Alberto, A History of Reading (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2014).

Onega Jaén, Susana, and José Angel García Landa, eds., Narratology: An Introduction (London, UK: Routledge, 1996), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315843018

Stam, Robert, Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).

1 See, for example, William Bascom, ‘The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives,’ The Journal of American Folklore, 78:307 (1965), 3–20.

2 Roland Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,’ in A Roland Barthes Reader, ed. by Susan Sontag, trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Vintage, 1994), pp. 251–52.

3 Based on Narratology: An Introduction, ed. by Susana Onega Jaén and José Angel García Landa (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 3, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315843018

4 Haiku by Matsuo Bashō, in Daniel Crump Buchanan, One Hundred Famous Haiku (Tokyo: Japan Publications, 1973), p. 87.

5 Haiku by Matsuo Bashō, in Buchanan, p. 88.

6 H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511816932

7 See David Lodge, The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts (New York, NY: Viking, 1993), p. 203.

8 For a detailed history, see Paul Cobley, Narrative (London, UK: Routledge, 2014).

9 Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2014).

10 See Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017).

11 David Herman, Basic Elements of Narrative (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444305920; Jørgen Dines Johansen, Literary Discourse: A Semiotic-Pragmatic Approach to Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442676725

12 Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

13 Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

14 See Seymour Benjamin Chatman, Reading Narrative Fiction (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1993); Seymour Benjamin Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).

15 See Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).

16 Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

2. Plot

© Ignasi Ribó, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0187.02

In the previous chapter, we defined narrative as the semiotic representation of a sequence of events, meaningfully connected by time and cause. But what precisely are events? And what constitutes a sequence of events? Does it matter whether the connecting thread that makes up that sequence is time or cause, or perhaps both? These are some of the essential questions that we will try to untangle in this chapter.

To be sure, they are not easy questions to answer. Narratology has struggled with them for some time and has come up with a range of terms and theories that sometimes bring more confusion than clarity. We will not delve here into the complexities of theory or the endless terminological discussions that have plagued the field.1 But we do need to introduce the key conceptual distinction between story and plot, which has been key to achieve a better understanding of the structure and function of narratives.

Fig. 2.1 Bust of Aristotle. Marble Roman copy after a Greek bronze original by Lysippos from 330 BC. Ludovisi Collection, photograph by Jastrow (2006), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aristotle_Altemps_Inv8575.jpg

The concept of plot dates all the way back to Aristotle (Fig. 2.1), who defined mythos as the arrangement or ‘organisation of events’ and argued that it was the most important element of storytelling.2 At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Russian formalists recovered this concept and established a key distinction between the ‘story’ (fabula) and the ‘plot’ (szujet) of a narrative.3 In the English language, the translation of these terms has created and continues to create a considerable amount of confusion, derived from the fact that ‘story’ is used at the same time as a generic term for narrative and as a technical term in narratology. For the purpose of this textbook, we will obviate these problems and simply integrate this important distinction into the semiotic model of narrative presented in the previous chapter.

First, we will discuss more precisely the distinction between story and plot, clarifying what we understand by an ‘event’ and the different ways in which the events of a narrative can be connected. Then we will look at the mechanisms of emplotment, the specific operations that can be applied to a story when arranging it into a plot. By arranging events in a meaningful and coherent structure that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, these mechanisms can result in many kinds of plot. We will look at a few of these, which are quite common in prose fiction. Most of these plots are motivated by a conflict, which can be external or internal, and lead to some form of resolution. We will look at this ‘story as war’ analogy and present a five-stage general structure that can be found in many narrative plots. Finally, we will discuss two important mechanisms of emplotment at the micro level, suspense and surprise, which are often used by writers to engage readers and hook them to the narrative.

2.1 The Thread of Narrative

As we pointed out earlier, the story is the message that the narrator communicates to the narratee in a narrative. In this sense, it refers to a set of events happening in an alternative world, which we call the storyworld. We can define narrative events as changes of state occurring in the storyworld.4 Such a world could be an accurate reflection of the lifeworld of the writer and his readers or an imaginary world that has never actually existed. Whatever the truthfulness of this storyworld, the events of the story are supposed to have happened in it. These events can be actions undertaken by characters, but they can simply be situations, incidents, experiences, or things that happen to them or to their environment.

Let us imagine a simplified story to clarify these ideas. In this story, we only have five events: (1) George rode to the lake, (2) George slew the dragon, (3) George rescued the princess, (4) George and the princess rode away from the lake, and (5) George and the princess got married in the castle. We can display these events as marks in a horizontal arrow representing time (see Fig. 2.2).

Fig. 2.2 Diagram showing events interconnected by time only. By Ignasi Ribó, CC BY.

This is an arrangement of the events according to their succession in time. And this is what we call the story. Of course, the events in this story are also implicitly connected by cause (for example, event three is the consequence of event two). But our arrangement does not stress those connections. It simply reflects when the events happened in relation to each other (event two comes after event one, event three after event two, etc.).

It is unlikely, however, that the narrator will arrange the events of the story in such a simple fashion when telling it to the narratee. One thing the narrator could do, for example, is to stress the causal connections between the events: (1) George rode to the lake looking for the princess, (2) George slew the dragon in order to rescue the princess, (3) After killing the dragon, George rescued the princess, (4) George and the princess rode away from the lake to find safety in her castle, and (5) The princess married George to thank him for rescuing her from the dragon. We can display the causal connections with curved lines (see Fig. 2.3).

Fig. 2.3 Diagram showing events interconnected by time and cause. By Ignasi Ribó, CC BY.

Another thing that the narrator could do is to present the events in a different order, without necessarily following their sequence in time. For example, he could begin by telling the narratee about (1) the wedding between George and the princess, and only then go on to explain why the princess accepted George as her husband by telling how (2) George rode to the lake looking for the princess, (3) slew the dragon, and (4) escaped to safety with the princess. In this case, we would need to alter the representation of the sequence of events in the narrative (see Fig. 2.4).

Fig. 2.4 Diagram showing events interconnected by time and cause, with the order of events altered by emplotment. By Ignasi Ribó, CC BY.

We call the actual arrangement of the sequence of events by the narrator of the story the ‘plot.’ Emplotment can involve simple modifications to the story, for example when the narrator tells the story ‘as it happened.’ But plots can also be much more complex and modify substantially the order of events, their duration, or the connections between them. As the novelist E. M. Forster explained,

We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died, and then the queen died,’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief,’ is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. Or again: ‘The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.’ This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development. It suspends the time-sequence, it moves as far away from the story as its limitations will allow. Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story we say, ‘and then?’ If it is in a plot we ask, ‘why?’5

2.2 Emplotment

Stories can be arranged into many kinds of plot. And there can never be a story without a plot, even if the plot is simply the presentation of events in their chronological succession, which would make the plot indistinguishable from the story. In fact, the story is only an abstraction, which is never accessed directly as such (either by the reader, the implied reader, or the narratee). What we read in a narrative is always a particular emplotment of the story.

Fig. 2.5 Miniature of St. George and the Dragon, ms. of Legenda aurea, Paris (1382). British Library Royal 19 B XVII, f. 109, Public Domain, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/St_George_Royal19BXVII_109.jpg

For instance, the story of Saint George and the dragon, which we have simplified as an example in the previous section, has been told in different ways (Fig. 2.5). The succession of events is not the same in all these retellings. The narrator might begin the tale with the apparition of the plague-bearing dragon that poisons the lake and forces the kingdom to sacrifice their children to appease the beast. But the narrator might also begin with George riding near the lake and hearing the cries of distress from the princess. Some retellings invest much time recreating the conversation between George and the princess at that moment, while others move directly to the fight between George and the dragon. In some retellings of the story, George marries the princess at the end. But in others the marriage, whether it happened or not, is left out of the tale. All these versions stem from different decisions on the part of the authors and result in different plots of the same story. We call emplotment the process of arranging the events of the story into a narrative message communicated by the narrator to the narratee.

Emplotment involves five basic operations:6

Order: The sequence of events in the plot may or may not follow a strict chronological succession. Emplotment can modify the order in which the events are presented by the narrator, for example by beginning at some point in the middle of the story (in medias res) and then jumping back to events that happened earlier (flashback) or later (flashforward).Duration: The duration of the events in the plot may or may not reflect the actual duration of those events in the story. Emplotment can modify the duration of the events presented by the narrator, for example by compressing time (e.g. telling fifty years in the life of a character in one paragraph) or expanding time (e.g. describing a kiss that lasted for one second in ten pages).Frequency: The number of times that events are repeated in a plot may or may not reflect the number of times that those events occurred in the story. Emplotment can modify the frequency of the events presented by the narrator, for example by repeating the same event several times in the plot (repetition, e.g. telling the same murder from different perspectives) or collapsing several events of similar nature into a single event (iteration, e.g. telling the protagonist’s daily work routine as one exemplary set of events happening on any given day).Connection: The connections between the events in the plot may or may not reflect the actual connections between the events in the story. Emplotment can modify the meaning of the events presented by the narrator through the establishment of explicit or implicit causal connections between them. Ultimately, of course, it will depend on the reader’s interpretation to determine which causal connections need to be retained from the narrative beyond the basic chronological succession of events.Relevance: Similarly, the information about the events provided in the plot may or may not exhaust the actual information that is relevant about those events in the story. Emplotment can modify the meaning of the events presented by the narrator by providing or withholding information related to those events. Once again, the reader will have to interpret which of the pieces of information presented are relevant and fill in the gaps left by the narrator.

Not every plot applies all these operations to the story. As we have seen, it is even possible to have a plot that does not modify or add causality to the chronological succession of events. These operations are simply theoretical possibilities, which writers may or may not use to arrange the events of the story told by the narrator.

2.3 Beginnings, Middles, and Ends

As pointed out by Aristotle in his Poetics, plots are generally arranged to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.7 But Aristotle was not simply stating the obvious fact that plots start at some point, extend during some time, and finish at another point. What he meant is that plots have an internal coherence that connects beginnings with endings through a meaningful and purposeful development. Unlike events in life, which simply happen, without any coherence or purpose, emplotted events are meaningfully connected to form a coherent whole. In real life, there is no such thing as a ‘beginning’ or an ‘ending,’ unless someone turns those events into a plot. Even a person’s birth or death are unconnected events, without any meaning or significance in the general scheme of things. We need to emplot those two events, together with whatever happens in the middle, into some kind of narrative (e.g. ‘he was born in 1903, worked as an accountant during most of his life, and died peacefully in his own bed aged 82’) before they become a beginning and an end, the opening and closure of a biographical plot.

Biography, the narrative of a person’s life, is a type of plot that seems quite natural to us, accustomed as we are to see ourselves and other individuals as coherent and meaningful entities. It is not surprising, therefore, that biographical plots have often been used by fiction writers to arrange their stories. For example, Daniel Defoe’s classic novel Robinson Crusoe (Fig. 2.6) begins with the eponymous character’s birth and goes on to narrate his life adventures, including the time he spent as a castaway on a remote desert island. Although the novel ends somewhere in the middle of Robinson’s life, while promising a second part to the story, the organising principle of the plot is clearly biographical.

Fig. 2.6 Title page and portrait of Robinson Crusoe in the first edition of Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crosoe (1719). British Library, Ambre Troizat, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/The_life_and_Strange_Surprizing_Adventures_of_Robinson_Crosoe%2C_London%2C_1719.png

But biography is only one of the many kinds of plot that we find in narrative. Since Aristotle, many typologies of plot (sometimes called masterplots) have been proposed.8 While the best of these typologies might be able to capture certain recurrent aspects of emplotment, they can never embrace all possible narrative plots. Provided we take these typologies as an orientation, and avoid turning them into rigid and normative taxonomies, they can help us to better understand the various ways in which narrators can arrange the events of the plot.

For example, the following are seven kinds of plot that we often find in popular novels and short stories, described in terms of beginnings, middles, and ends:9

Fig. 2.7 Illustration of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ by Arthur Rackham (1909), Public Domain, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Hansel-and-gretel-rackham.jpg

Overcoming the monster: It begins with the protagonist setting out to defeat an evil (or threatening) force; it narrates the fight between the hero and this monster; and it ends with the defeat of the monster. For example, in ‘Hansel and Gretel’ (Fig. 2.7), a German fairy tale recorded by the Brothers Grimm, two children try to escape from the forest house of a witch who has kidnapped them and intends to eat them.From rags to riches: It begins with a poor protagonist; it narrates how she goes on to acquire wealth and power, but then loses everything again (or loses and regains it once more); and it ends with her becoming wiser thanks to the experience. An example of this kind of plot is the Middle Eastern folk tale ‘Aladdin and the Magic Lamp,’ often included in One Thousand and One Nights, which tells the adventures of a young and poor orphan who becomes rich and powerful with the help of a genie.The quest: It begins with the protagonist (and maybe some companions) setting out to obtain an important object; it narrates the many obstacles that they must face; and it ends with the successful completion of the quest. J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel The Hobbit is a famous example of this kind of plot, where the hobbit Bilbo and his companions set out on a dangerous quest to recover the treasure guarded by a dragon.Voyage and return: It begins with the protagonist departing her home for a strange land; it narrates the threats and adventures that she needs to overcome; and it ends with her return home enriched by the experience. Lewis Carroll’s fantasy novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where the protagonist suddenly finds herself in a strange underground world, is a well-known example of this kind of plot.Comedy: It begins with a light and humorous protagonist; it narrates the various circumstances and problems that she must overcome; and it ends with the happy resolution of these circumstances or problems. An example of a novel with this kind of plot is Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, where the Dashwood sisters end up happily married after all sorts of complications.Tragedy: It begins with a protagonist who is affected by some sort of mistake or flaw that is the origin of a certain conflict; it narrates how he tries to overcome this conflict; and it ends with his failure to do so, and perhaps with the recognition of his mistake or flaw. A modern example of this kind of plot is Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita, where the sexual obsession of an aged literature professor for a twelve-year-old girl leads him to commit successive transgressions until he dies in prison. Rebirth: It begins with the protagonist living her normal life; it narrates how certain circumstances (normally adverse ones) force her to change her life; and it ends with her transformation into a new person capable of overcoming those circumstances. A well-known example of this kind of plot is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, where old Scrooge, a miser who is unable to partake in Christmas celebrations, becomes a kinder person after receiving the visit of several ghosts.

2.4 Conflict and Resolution

In the masterplots described above, the main characters (or protagonists) are motivated to act by some conflict. Whether this conflict is external (e.g. a monster or a circumstance that poses a threat) or internal (e.g. a mistake or a flaw in one’s character), the kernel of the plot seems to be the need to overcome this conflict and find some form of resolution.

Ancient Greeks referred to conflict as agon. The importance of this concept for narrative can be grasped by the fact that we still call the leading character of a story its ‘protagonist’ (meaning, one who fights for something or someone). We also call the main enemy of this character, whether it is another character or some natural or supernatural force, the ‘antagonist’ (meaning, one who fights against something or someone).

In the Poetics, Aristotle claims that plots can be divided into those where the protagonist succeeds in overcoming the conflict (goes from misfortune to fortune, as in comedy) and those where the protagonist falls victim to the conflict (goes from fortune to misfortune, as in tragedy).10 In both cases, there is a reversal of fortune (peripeteia) and some form of resolution, which may or may not involve a recognition or gain in knowledge for the protagonist (anagnorisis).11 For example, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (Fig. 2.8), King Oedipus faces a devastating plague in his city of Thebes (conflict) and seeks to find the person responsible for spreading the infection. A carefully crafted series of events lead Oedipus to discover (reversal of fortune and recognition) that the culprit is none other than himself, having unknowingly killed his father and married his own mother many years earlier. At the end, after his mother/wife commits suicide, Oedipus blinds himself and is banished from Thebes.

Fig. 2.8 Oedipus and the Sphinx. Tondo of an Attic red-figure kylix, 480–470 BC. From Vulci. Photograph by Juan José Moral (2009), captured at Museo Gregoriano Etrusco, room XI, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oidipous_sphinx_MGEt_16541_reconstitution.svg

Aristotle’s description of tragic conflict and resolution, as exemplified in Oedipus Rex, has been tremendously influential throughout history and has resulted in the view that all plots are essentially motivated by a conflict and move forward to close or resolve this conflict. This idea has been formalised in the five stages of Freytag’s pyramid (Fig. 2.9), which was originally conceived to describe the conventional emplotment of dramatic plays in five acts,12 but is often applied to narrative plots as well:

Fig. 2.9 Schema of Freytag’s pyramid. By Ignasi Ribó, based on Gustav Freytag, Freytag’s Technique of the Drama: An Exposition of Dramatic Composition and Art, trans. by Elias J MacEvan (Charleston, SC: Bibliobazaar, 2009), CC BY.

Exposition: In this initial stage, the environments and the characters, particularly the protagonist, are introduced. There is no conflict yet, but we might get indications about the conflicting goals of the characters and the motives that will drive the plot.Rising action: At some point, the (external or internal) conflict is revealed and provokes a series of events (confrontations, reversals, adventures, etc.) that move the plot forward and always towards a higher degree of intensity. In novels and short stories, this stage tends to be the longest and includes most of the vicissitudes of the plot. Climax: This is the point where the rising action achieves its maximum level of intensity and the conflict reaches the decisive confrontation. It is also a turning point, because from here on the conflict can only move towards the final resolution. The climax is not always an external event, such as a battle between the protagonist and the antagonist. It can also be a more subtle reversal of fortune, for example the recognition of one’s own guilt, which decides the outcome of the conflict.Falling action: The events that follow the climax might still be motivated by the conflict, but they tend to wane in intensity and progressively lead to some form of resolution. Characters settle their confrontations, solve or abandon their problems, overcome or submit to existing threats and enemies. In one way or another, the climax has already decided the outcome of the conflict and the falling action needs to bring the situation back to an equilibrium. In prose fiction, this stage is often much shorter and does not include as many events as the rising action.Resolution