Evaluating Plot

The customary test of a plot's effectiveness = its unity: the degree to which each episode and the place it occupies in the narrative structure of the work bear in some necessary and logical (or psychological) way upon the resolution of the initial conflict.

Also plausibility(of an episode or of the plot as a whole) –whether the events and their resolution are guilty of violating our sense of the probable or possible.

Author's use of chance (events that occur without apparent cause or sufficient preparation) and coincidence (the accidental occurrence of two events that have a certain correspondence).

Analyzing Plot

1. What is the conflict (or conflicts) on which the plot turns? It is external, internal, or some combination of the two?

2. What are the chief episodes or incidents that make up the plot? Is its development strictly chronological, or is the chronology rearranged in some way?

3. Compare the plot's beginning and end. What essential changes have taken place?

4. Describe the plot in terms of its exposition, complication, crisis, falling action, and resolution.

5. Is the plot unified? Do the individual episodes logically relate to one another?

6. Is the ending appropriate to and consistent with the rest of the plot?

7. Is the plot plausible? What role, if any, do chance and coincidence play?

Character

The relationship between plot and character - vital and necessary one.

Without character - no plot and, hence,→ no story.

For most readers of fiction characters = primary attraction

Fictionoften gives direct and immediate access to the character’s inner life

Even when it doesn’t, there is enough information to make judgments about the internal makeup of the character.

In literary analysis - 3 separate but closely connected activities:

1. to establish the personalities of the characters and to identify their intellectual, emotional, and moral qualities.

2. techniques an author uses to create, develop, and present characters to the reader.

3. whether the characters so presented are credible and convincing. ←important in evaluating the success of characterization, can only take place within the context of the novel or short story as a whole, which links character to the other elements of fiction.

Characters in Fiction

The term character applies to any individual in a literary work.

In analysisdescribed

• by their relationship to plot,

• by the degree of development they are given by the author,

• by whether or not they undergo significant character change.

Protagonist - the major, or central, character of the plot; easy to identify:essential character without whom there would be no plot; on their fatethe attention of the reader is focused

Antagonist - his opponent, the character against whom the protagonist struggles or contends; can be difficult to identify (e.g. the marlin that challenges the courage and endurance of the old fisherman Santiago in Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea); may not be a living creature (e.g. hostile social or natural environment with which the protagonist is forced to contend)

The terms protagonist and antagonist do notimply a judgment about the moral worth of either, for many protagonists and antagonists (like their counterparts in real life) embody a complex mixture of both positive and negative qualities.

• they are more suitable terms than hero, heroine, or villain, which connote a degree of moral absoluteness.

Very often the title of the work identifies the protagonist: King Oedipus, Othello, Tom Jones, Rip Van Winkle, Don Juan, The Deerslayer, Madame Bovary, HeddaGabler, Sister Carrie, The Darling, A Rose for Emily, Herzog, and Becket.

But titles can be deceptive.

To describe the relative degree to which fictional characters are developed by their creators, E.M. Forster distinguishes between what he calls flat and round characters.

Flat characters - embody or represent a single characteristic, trait, or idea, or a very limited number of such qualities. =type characters, one-dimensional characters, or caricatures.

Recognized by incompleteness, the oddity of their appearance, by their mannerisms, by the recurring words they utter.

They often serve as convenient vehicles for humor and satire.

They are predictable and never vary; they are not changed by circumstance.

They are usually minor actors, but not always.

For example, Montresor and Fortunato are the protagonist and antagonist, respectively, in Edgar Allan Foe's The Cask of Amontillado. Yet they are both flat characters: Montresor, who leads the unsuspecting Fortunato to be walled up in his family crypt, embodies nothing but cold-blooded revenge. And Fortunato, who is dressed in the cap and motley of the jester, complete with bells, is quite literally a fool.

Flat characters have much in common with the kind of stock characters who appear again and again in certain types of literary works:

e. g., the rich uncle of domestic comedy, the hard-boiled private eye of the detective story, the female confidante of the romance, and the mustachioed villain of old-fashioned drama.

Round characters - embody a number of qualities and traits, and are complex multidimensional characters of considerable intellectual and emotional depth who have the capacity to grow and change.

Major characters in fiction are usually round characters.

The terms round and flat do not automatically imply value judgments.

Each kind of character has its uses in literature (e.g. Poe's successful use of flat characters to dramatize the theme of revenge in The Cask of Amontillado).

Even when they are minor characters, they are convenient devices to draw out and help us to understand the personalities of characters who are more fully realized.

Round characters are not necessarily more alive or more convincing than flat ones. If they are, it is because the author has succeeded in making them so.

Based on the capacity to develop or change as the result of their experiences,characters are distinguished as

Dynamic characters (exhibit a capacity to change) and

Static characters (do notexhibit a capacity to change).

The degree and rate of character change varies widely (even among dynamic characters):

• subtle development, may go almost unnoticed;

• sufficiently drastic and profounddevelopment to cause a total reorganization of the character's personality or system of values.

Change in character may come slowly over many pages and chapters, or it may take place with a dramatic suddenness that surprises.

Dynamic characters include the protagonists in most novels (= excellent vehicles for illustrating the process of change). (e.g. David Copperfield, Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby)

Static characters largely untouched by the events that have taken place; tend to be minor, but not always. (e.g. Olenka, the protagonist of Anton Chekhov's The Darling is a static character whose essential qualities are submissiveness and blind devotion. Without opinions, personality, or inner resources of her own, she passes through a series of relationships which leave her character essentially unchanged). Usually they are usedto emphasize and set off by contrast the development taking place in others.