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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 20th 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.
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