Plot

The plot (which Aristotle termed the mythos) in a dramatic or narrative work is constituted by its events and actions, as these are rendered and ordered toward achieving particular artistic and emotional effects. This description is deceptively simple, because the actions (including verbal discourse as well as physical actions) are performed by particular characters in a work, and are the means by which they exhibit their moral and dispositional qualities. Plot and character are therefore interdependent critical concepts—as Henry James has said, “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” (See character and characterization.) Notice also that a plot is distinguishable from the story—that is, a bare synopsis of the temporal order of what happens. When we summarize the story in a literary work, we say that first this happens, then that, then that. . . . It is only when we specify how this is related to that, by causes and motivations, and in what ways all these matters are rendered, ordered, and organized so as to achieve their particular effects, that a synopsis begins to be adequate to the plot. (On the distinction between story and plot see narrative and narratology.)

There are a great variety of plot forms. For example, some plots are designed to achieve tragic effects, and others to achieve the effects of comedy, romance, satire, or of some other genre. Each of these types in turn exhibits diverse plot patterns, and may be represented in the mode either of drama or of narrative, and either in verse or in prose. The following terms, widely current in traditional criticism, are useful in distinguishing the component elements of plots and in helping to discriminate types of plots, and of the characters appropriate to them, in both narrative and dramatic literature.

As a plot evolves it arouses expectations in the audience or reader about the future course of events and actions and how characters will respond to them. A lack of certainty on the part of a concerned reader about what is going to happen, especially to characters with whom the reader has established a bond of sympathy, is known as suspense. If what in fact happens violates the expectations we have formed, it is known as surprise. The interplay of suspense and surprise is a prime source of vitality in a traditional plot. The most effective surprise, especially in realistic narratives, is one which turns out, in retrospect, to have been grounded in what has gone before, even though we have hitherto made the wrong inference from the given facts of circumstance and character. As E. M. Forster put it, the shock of the unexpected, “followed by the feeling, ‘oh, that’s all right’ is a sign that all is well with the plot.” A “surprise ending,” in the pejorative sense, is one in which the author resolves the plot without adequate earlier grounds in characterization or events, often by the use of highly unlikely coincidence; there are numerous examples in the short stories of O. Henry. (For one type of manipulated ending, see deus ex machina.) Dramatic irony is a special kind of suspenseful expectation, when the audience or readers foresee the oncoming disaster or triumph but the character does not.

A plot is commonly said to have unity of action (or to be “an artistic whole”) if it is apprehended by the reader or auditor as a complete and ordered structure of actions, directed toward the intended effect, in which none of the prominent component parts, or incidents, is nonfunctional; as Aristotle put this concept (Poetics, section 8), all the parts are “so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoint and dislocate the whole.” Aristotle claimed that it does not constitute a unified plot to present a series of episodes which are strung together simply because they happen to a single character.

A successful later development which Aristotle did not foresee is the type of structural unity that can be achieved with double plots, familiar in Elizabethan drama. In this form, a subplot—a second story that is complete and interesting in its own right—is introduced into the play; when skillfully invented and managed, the subplot serves to broaden our perspective on the main plot and to enhance rather than diffuse the overall effect. The integral subplot may have the relation of analogy to the main plot (the Gloucester story in King Lear), or else of counterpoint against it (the comic subplot involving Falstaff in 1 Henry IV).

The order of a unified plot, Aristotle pointed out, is a continuous sequence of beginning, middle, and end. The beginning initiates the main action in a way which makes us look forward to something more; the middle presumes what has gone before and requires something to follow; and the end follows from what has gone before but requires nothing more; we feel satisfied that the plot is complete. The structural beginning (sometimes also called the “initiating action,” or “point of attack”) need not be the initial stage of the action that is brought to a climax in the narrative or play. The epic, for example, plunges in medias res, “in the middle of things” (see epic), many short stories begin at the point of the climax itself, and the writer of a drama often captures our attention in the opening scene with a representative incident, related to and closely preceding the event which precipitates the central situation or conflict. Thus Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet opens with a street fight between the servants of two great houses, and his Hamlet with the apparition of a ghost; the exposition of essential prior matters —the feud between the Capulets and Montagues, or the posture of affairs in the Royal House of Denmark—Shakespeare weaves rapidly and skillfully into the dialogue of these startling initial scenes. In the novel, the modern drama, and especially the motion picture, such exposition is sometimes managed by flashbacks: interpolated narratives or scenes (often justified, or naturalized, as a memory, a reverie, or a confession by one of the characters) which represent events that happened before the time at which the work opened. Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman (1949) and Ingmar Bergman’s film Wild Strawberries (1957) make persistent and skillful use of this device.

The German critic Gustav Freytag, in Technique of the Drama (1863), introduced an analysis of plot that is known as Freytag’s Pyramid. He described the typical plot of a five-act play as a pyramidal shape, consisting of a rising action, climax, and falling action. Although the total pattern that Freytag described applies only to a limited number of plays, various of his terms are frequently echoed by critics of prose fiction as well as drama. As applied to Hamlet, for example, the rising action (a section that Aristotle had called the complication) begins, after the opening scene and exposition, with the ghost’s telling Hamlet that he has been murdered by his brother Claudius; it continues with the developing conflict between Hamlet and Claudius, in which Hamlet, despite setbacks, succeeds in controlling the course of events. The rising action reaches the climax of the hero’s fortunes with his proof of the King’s guilt by the device of the play within a play (III. ii.). Then comes the crisis, the reversal or “turning point” of the fortunes of the protagonist, in his failure to kill the King while he is at prayer. This inaugurates the falling action; from now on the antagonist, Claudius, largely controls the course of events, until the catastrophe, or outcome, which is decided by the death of the hero, as well as of Claudius, the Queen, and Laertes. “Catastrophe” is usually applied to tragedy only; a more general term for this precipitating final scene, which is applied to both comedy and tragedy, is the denouement (French for “unknotting”): the action or intrigue ends in success or failure for the protagonist, the conflicts are settled, the mystery is solved, or the misunderstanding cleared away. A frequently used alternative term for the outcome of a plot is the resolution. In many plots the denouement involves a reversal, or in Aristotle’s Greek term, peripety, in the protagonist’s fortunes, whether to the protagonist’s failure or destruction, as in tragedy, or success, as in comic plots. The reversal frequently depends on a discovery (in Aristotle’s term, anagnorisis). This is the recognition by the protagonist of something of great importance hitherto unknown to him or to her: Cesario reveals to the Duke at the end of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night that he is really Viola; the fact of Iago’s lying treachery dawns upon Othello; Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, in his comic novel by that name (1742), discovers on the evidence of a birthmark—“as fine a strawberry as ever grew in a garden”—that he is in reality the son of Mr. and Mrs. Wilson.

From- A Glossary of Literary Terms - M. H. Abrams