The Plot
THE PLOT
Think for a moment of a story that you really enjoyed, one of those stories that you remember that you couldn’t put down, that you had to keep reading because of its suspense. It is more than likely that it had a magnificent plot. When we read, we have to care about what is happening and what might happen next. And if that is not the case, the stories we read will be abandoned before we finish them.
Works of fiction are not, and cannot be, about a million things, and they are usually only about one thing. Plot, therefore, brings coherence to fiction by uniting all the characters, the settings, the voice, and everything around them around a single organising force. That force is the answer to the typical question “what is it about?” in a short story or novel.
Plot structure (beginning, crux and denouement)
The model of beginning, crux and denouement is undoubtedly well-established, as there has been a discourse on how drama works for more than two thousand three hundred years, since Aristotle’s Poetics. Indeed, much of our thinking about narrative derives from the Poetics, which in turn grew out of the flourishing Greek theatre and the mythology that surrounded it, both rich in story and plot. What Aristotle codified continues to apply story after story and novel after novel today.
We will now review these three sections and comment on the function of each.
The beginning. The introduction or premise of a story must fulfil three functions:
- It should introduce the reader in the middle of the action, not when nothing is happening.
- It should provide all the basic information necessary for the reader to get into the story.
- It should establish the question: what is the story about?
Let us look at some examples on this last point:
Bernard Malamud’s The Magic Barrel is a busy work, populated by fascinating characters and a memorable narrative style, but the basic concern or question it sets up is whether the rabbinical student Leo Finkle will find a woman.
In Peter Cameron’s Memorial Day we wonder whether the boy who narrates the story can somehow reclaim his former life, the one in which his parents were still married.
In James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues, our narrator wonders if Sonny will be able to overcome his difficult life and his suffering.
These three questions must be presented briefly. The reader does not feel like spending a lot of time catching up and so the explanations must be limited. The reader wants to get to the interesting part, the action, in other words what we call the crux of the story.
The crux of the story usually takes up most of the space in the book. It contains additional information that further deepens the characters and situations that we have encountered in the beginning. It is also in the pivot where the central action of the story takes place.
Most importantly, the crux section is where the daunting obstacles that cross the protagonist’s path to his or her goal appear again and again and where the forces arrayed against him or her become ever more powerful. It is there that the conflict grows and grows until it can grow no more.
The denouement. The denouement or ending is probably the shortest part of the work, particularly in contemporary fiction. Contemporary writers tend not to expand on their denouements and avoid fully unfolding the final ramifications of what is taking place. However, the denouement of a story has important responsibilities. This section of the story may be the shortest, but it is also the place where everything comes together.
The denouement usually follows a pattern that might be called the ‘three Cs’: crisis, climax and consequences. The crisis is the point at which the tension reaches its peak; the climax is where the tension is broken and where we get the answer to the question in point 3 of the premise. The consequences are then alluded to, albeit briefly, at the end of the play.
ACTIVITY:
Read the following story by Mario Benedetti, La noche de los feos. Identify the beginning, middle and end of the story.
“THE NIGHT OF THE UGLY (Mario Benedetti)
We are both ugly. Not even vulgarly ugly. She has a sunken cheekbone. Since she was eight, when she had the operation. My disgusting mark next to my mouth comes from a fierce burn, which occurred in my early teens.
Nor can it be said that we have tender eyes, those sort of beacons of justification by which the horrible sometimes manage to get close to beauty. No, not at all. Both hers and mine are eyes of resentment, reflecting only the little or no resignation with which we face our misfortune. Perhaps that has brought us together. Perhaps united is not the most appropriate word. I am referring to the implacable hatred that each of us feels for our own faces.
We met at the entrance to the cinema, queuing to see two beautiful people on the screen. It was there that for the first time we examined each other without sympathy but with dark solidarity; it was there that we registered, right from the first glance, our respective solitudes. Everyone in the queue was in pairs, but they were also real couples: husbands, boyfriends, lovers, grandparents, who knows. Everyone – hand in hand or arm in arm – had someone. Only she and I had our hands loose and twitching.
We looked at each other’s ugliness carefully, insolently, without curiosity. I traced the crevice of her cheekbone with the assurance of the casualness that my shrunken cheek gave me. She didn’t blush. I liked that she was stern, that she returned my inspection with a careful glance at the smooth, shiny, beardless area of my old burn.
At last we went in. We sat in separate but adjoining rows. She couldn’t look at me, but I, even in the gloom, could make out the blonde-haired nape of her neck, her fresh, shapely ear. It was the ear on her normal side.
For an hour and forty minutes we admired the respective beauties of the rough hero and the soft heroine. At least I have always been able to admire the pretty. I reserve my dislike for my face and sometimes for God. Also for the faces of other uglies, other scarecrows. Maybe I should feel pity, but I cannot. The truth is that they are something like mirrors. Sometimes I wonder what the fate of the myth would have been if Narcissus had a sunken cheekbone, or the acid had burnt his cheek, or half his nose was missing, or he had a seam in his forehead.
I waited for her at the exit. I walked a few yards past her, then spoke to her. When she stopped and looked at me, I had the impression that she was hesitating. I invited her to talk to me for a while in a café or a coffee shop. Suddenly she agreed.
The café was full, but at that moment a table was vacated. As we passed through the crowd, the signs, the gestures of astonishment, remained behind us. My antennae are particularly trained to pick up that unhealthy curiosity, that unconscious sadism of those with an ordinary, miraculously symmetrical face. But this time my trained intuition was not even necessary, for my ears were able to register murmurs, coughs, false coughs. A hideous face in isolation obviously has its interest; but two uglinesses together constitute in themselves a greater, less than coordinated spectacle; something to be looked at in company, with one (or one) of those good-looking people with whom the world is worth sharing.
We sat down, ordered two ice creams, and she had the courage (I liked that too) to take her little mirror out of her handbag and fix her hair. Her beautiful hair.
“What are you thinking ?,” I asked.
She put the mirror away and smiled. The cheek well changed shape.
“A commonplace,” she said. “Such and such.”
We talked at length. After an hour and a half it was necessary to order two coffees to justify the prolonged stay. Suddenly I realised that both she and I were speaking with such hurtful frankness that it threatened to pass sincerity and become a near equivalent of hypocrisy. I decided to throw myself into the deep end.
“You feel excluded from the world, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, still looking at me.
“You admire the beautiful, the normal. You wish you had a face as poised as that little girl to your right, even though you are intelligent, and she, judging by her laugh, irredeemably stupid.”
“Yes.”
For the first time he couldn’t hold my gaze.
“I’d like that too. But there’s a chance, you know, that you and I might come up with something.”
“Something like what?”
“Like loving each other, heck. Or just getting along. Call it whatever you want, but there’s a chance.”
She frowned. She didn’t want to conceive of hope.
“Promise not to take me for a nutcase.”
“I promise.”
“The chance is to get us into the night. Into the whole night. In the total darkness. Do you understand me?”
“No.”
“You must understand me! The total darkness. Where you can’t see me, where I can’t see you. Your body is beautiful, didn’t you know that?”
She blushed, and the cleft of her cheek turned suddenly scarlet.
“I live alone, in a flat, and it’s close by.”
He raised his head and now he really looked at me, questioning me, inquiring about me, trying desperately to come up with a diagnosis.
“Come on,” he said.
I not only turned out the light but also pulled the double curtain. Next to me she was breathing. And it wasn’t labored breathing. She didn’t want me to help her undress.
I could see nothing, nothing. But I could still see that she was now motionless, waiting. I reached out cautiously with one hand, until I found her breast. My touch gave me a stimulating, powerful version. I saw her belly, her sex. Her hands also saw me.
At that moment I understood that I had to tear myself (and her) away from the lie that I had fabricated. Or tried to fabricate. It was like a flash of lightning. We were not that. We were not that.
It took all my reserves of courage, but I did it. My hand slowly ascended to his face, found the groove of horror, and began a slow, convincing, convinced caress. In fact my fingers (at first a little shaky, then progressively serene) passed many times over her tears.
Then, when I least expected it, his hand also reached my face, and ran over and over the seam and the smooth skin, that beardless island of my sinister mark.
We wept till dawn. Wretched, happy. Then I rose and drew back the double curtain.
ACTIVITY:
Create a complete outline for a short story or tale that is structured as follows:
-The story should begin with the protagonist setting off on a journey. The destination could be as close as the corner shop or as far away as the other end of the universe, but the story should end when the protagonist reaches his or her destination or returns to the starting point.
-Your outline should clearly have a beginning, middle and end, as well as a crisis, climax and consequences. Don’t be forced to make everything perfect. You can choose other options if you end up writing the story. When we go on a trip, we don’t always stick to the planned route.