3. Crisis

2. Complication 4. Falling action

______________ ______________

1. Exposition 5. Resolution

Beginning Middle End

In some novels this five-stage structure is repeated in many of the individual chapters, while the novel as a whole builds on a series of increasing conflicts and crises. Such a structure is found both in such classics of fiction as Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” and in the adventure thrillers of Alistar MacLean.

EXPOSITION: The exposition is the beginning section in which the author provides the necessary background information, sets the scene, establishes the situation, and dates the action. It may also introduce the characters and the conflict, or the potential for conflict. The exposition may be accomplished in a single sentence or paragraph, or, in the case of some novels, occupy an entire chapter or more. Some plots require more exposition than others. A historical novel set in a foreign country several centuries ago obviously needs to provide the reader with more background information than a novel with a contemporary setting.

COMPLICATION: The complication which is sometimes referred to as the rising action, breaks the existing equilibrium and introduces the characters and underlying or inciting conflict (if they have not already been introduced by the exposition). The conflict is then developed gradually and intensified.

CRISIS: The crisis (also referred to as the climax) is that moment at which the plot reaches its point of greatest emotional intensity; it is the turning point of the plot, directly precipitating its resolution.

FALLING ACTION: Once the crisis has been reached, the tension subsides and the plot moves toward its appointed conclusion.

RESOLUTION: The final section of the plot is its resolution; it records the outcome of the conflict and establishes some new equilibrium or stability (however tentative and momentary). The resolution is also referred to as the conclusion or the denoument, the latter a French word meaning “unknotting” or “untying”.

Although the terms exposition, complication, crisis, falling action and resolution are helpful in understanding the relationship among the parts of some kinds of narrative, all plots, unfortunately, do not lend themselves to such neat and exact formulations. Even when they do, it is not unusual for critics and readers to disagree among themselves about the precise nature of the conflict – whether, for example, the protagonist is more in conflict with society than he is with himself – or about where the major crisis, or turning point of the narrative actually occurs. Nor is there any special reason that the crisis should occur at or near the middle of the plot. It can, in fact, occur at any moment. In James Joyce’s “Araby” and in a number of the other companion stories in “Dubliners” the crisis – in the form of a sudden illumination that Joyce called an epiphany – occurs at the very end of the story, and the falling action and the resolution are dispensed with altogether. Exposition and complication can also be omitted in favour of a plot that begins in medias res (“in the midst of things”). In much modern and contemporary fiction the plot consists of a “slice of life” into which we enter on the eve of crisis, and the reader is left to infer beginnings and antecedents – including the precise nature of the conflict – from what he or she is subsequently able to learn. Some stories are sometimes referred to as “plotless” in order to suggest that the author’s emphasis and interest have been shifted elsewhere, most frequently to character or idea.

Understanding a plot on a schematic level becomes even more difficult when dealing with works, usually novels, that have more than one plot. Many novels contain one or more subplots that reinforce by contrast or parallel the main plot. Some novels even contain a double plot, as in Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair”, where we are asked to follow the careers of both the selfish adventuress Becky Sharp and the innocent, good-hearted Amelia Sedley. As Amelia’s fortunes sink, Becky’s rise; then follows a reversal in which Amelia’s rise is paralleled by Becky’s slow but inevitable decline.

Selectivity

In deciding how much plot to include in a given work, how much emphasis to give individual episodes, and how these episodes are to be related to one another, the author’s selectivity comes fully into play. In general, the shorter the narrative, the greater the degree of selectivity that will be required. The very economy of the short story, for example, limits the amount of plot that can be included, a limitation of treatment that usually can be avoided in the longer novel. But no matter how much space there is at the writer’s disposal, it is not possible to tell the reader everything that “happened” to the characters. (James Joyce once contemplated writing a short story recording everything that happened during a single day in the lives of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. The result was Ulysses which grew to 767 pages and even then covered only twenty-one and a half hours.) In constructing the plot, the author will of necessity be forced to select those incidents that are most relevant to the story to be told. Those incidents that are the most significant will be emphasized and expanded into full-fledged dramatic scenes by using such devices as description, dialogue and action. Other incidents will be given relatively less emphasis through deliberate subordination. In the latter case, the author may shorten the dramatic elements of the scene or eliminate them altogether in favour of summary – in favour of telling, rather than showing. All these episodes, major or minor, need to advance the plot in precisely the same way or at the same pace, although the reader does have the right to expect that each will contribute in some way to a completed story.

The Ordering of Plot

The customary way of ordering the several episodes in a plot is to present them chronologically, that is, to approximate the order of their occurrence in time. Chronological plotting can be handled in a variety of ways. It can be tightly controlled, as in conventional five-stage detective stories. This is also the method in many historical novels, in which the separate episodes are linked closely and visibly in a firm cause/effect relationship, to give the impression of historical verisimilitude – “the way it was”. Each episode logically and inevitably unfolds from the one that preceded it, thereby generating a momentum that drives the plot forward its appointed resolution.

Chronological plot structure can be loose, relaxed and episodic. In Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the plots are composed of a series of separate and largely self-contained episodes, resembling so many beads on a string. The unifying element is the protagonist, as he wanders into and out of a series of adventures that, in their totality, initiate him to life and provide his moral education.

A third type of chronologically arranged plot is encountered in psychological novels, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Wolf’s To the Lighthouse, in which the reader’s attention is centered on the protagonist’s unfolding state of mind as it wrestles with some internal conflict or problem. Her the interest is in the passage of “psychological time”, which, in these novels, is presented through a technique called stream of consciousness. Reflecting the 20^th century interest in psychology, stream of consciousness attempts to give the illusion of overhearing the actual workings of a human mind by recording the continuous and apparently random flow of ideas, feelings, sensations, associations and perceptions as they register on the protagonist’s consciousness. The technique is difficult to sustain; and its effectiveness has been much debated among literary critics, in part because of the burden that it imposes on the reader’s patience and perceptiveness.

Finally, it is important to recognize that, even within plots which are mainly chronological, the temporal sequence is often deliberately broken and the chronological parts rearranged for the sake of emphasis and effect. Recall the two Hemingway’s stories in which we encounter the characters in the middle of their “story” and must infer what happened up to “now”. In this case and in others, although the main direction of the plot may be chronological and forward, the author is under no obligation to begin at the beginning. Hemingway has us begin in the middle of things; other authors may begin at the end and then, having intrigued and captured us, work backward to the beginning and then forward again to the middle. In still other cases, the chronology of plot may shift backward and forward in time, as for example in William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily, where the author deliberately sets aside the chronological ordering of events and their cause/effect relationship in order to establish an atmosphere of unreality, build suspense and mystery, and underscore Emily Grierson’s own attempt to deny the passage of time itself.

Perhaps the most frequently and conventionally used device of interrupting the flow of a chronologically ordered plot is the flashback, a summary or fully dramatized episode framed by the author in such a way as to make it clear that the events being discussed or dramatized took place at some earlier period of time. Flashbacks are often crucial to our understanding of the story, for they introduce us to information that would otherwise be unavailable and thus increase our knowledge and understanding of present events.

Evaluating Plot

Having studied a given story or novel, to see how the author has arranged and made us use the elements of plot, we should be ready to evaluate his or her success. The customary test of a plot’s effectiveness is 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. In the process on can also raise questions about the plausibility of a given episode or, for that matter, the plausibility of the plot as a whole – that is, whether the events and their resolution are guilty of violating our sense of the probable or possible. The violation of plausibility – which is, in turn, a violation of a basic intelligence of the reader – is a quality we often associate with popular commercial fiction, in which a happy ending seems to be grafted on a plot for the sake of convenience and propriety, when everything that preceded is pointed in the opposite direction.

One frequently used test of plausibility involves the 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). Although chance and coincidence occur in real life, their use in literature becomes suspect if they seem to be merely an artificial device for arranging events or imposing a resolution. Such events tend to mar or even destroy a plot’s plausibility and unity.

Analyzing Plot

In approaching a work of fiction for the first time, we can analyze the plot by attempting to answer such questions as the following:

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

2. What are the chief episodes or incidents that make up the plot? Is its development strictly chronological, or 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?