FICTION: Understanding the Text

Transcription

1 FICTION: Understanding the Text THE NORTON INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE Tenth Edition Allison Booth Kelly J. Mays

2 FICTION: Understanding the Text This section introduces you to the elements of fiction and provides you with tips for analyzing and interpreting them.

3 Plot Plot is the arrangement of the action, the series of events recounted in the story. Plot concerns causes and effects as well as the arrangement of moments in time. Plot creates a meaningful pattern out of the presentation of events, and it often relies on the rearrangement of chronological order.

4 Plot In between the beginning and the end, stories often reorder the time sequence within the fictional world. Stories can make use of flashbacks (the dramatization of a scene that happened before the fictional present) or flashforwards (projections into the future). Foreshadowing is when an author merely hints at what is to come.

5 Plot Pacing refers to the duration of episodes in a story relative both to other episodes in the story and to the time they would have taken in real life. Plots usually involve at least one conflict (a struggle of some sort) and its resolution. Conflicts can be external (one character s conflict with another character or with an outside force) or internal (within a character).

6 Plot Generally, plot follows a five-part pattern: exposition, rising action, turning point (or climax), falling action, and conclusion. Exposition, which usually occurs at the beginning of the story, introduces the characters, their situation, and often a time and place. Exposition usually reveals some sort of conflict.

7 Plot The rising action involves the narration of inciting incidents, or destabilizing events, that break the routine and intensify the conflict. The third part of a story is the turning point or climax, when the incidents and the conflicts they introduce converge on a decisive moment, realization, or action.

8 Plot The final phases of a story present the outcome, which is sometimes described in terms of falling action and conclusion. At this point, all the actions of the story are fulfilled, and the situation that was destabilized at the beginning of a story either becomes stable once more or is replaced by a new, stable situation.

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10 Narration and Point of View The narrator is the teller of a story or novel. The point of view of the story involves focus (the perspective through which the characters, events, and other details are viewed) and voice ( the words in which the story is narrated).

11 Narration and Point of View The narration can focus on a central consciousness, filtering descriptions of things, people, and events through an individual character s perceptions and responses. A third-person narrator uses the pronouns he, she, and they. Third-person narrators can be unlimited (omniscient) or limited.

12 Narration and Point of View Omniscient, or unlimited, narrators have unlimited access to the thoughts of more than one character. Limited point of view refers to a story that focuses on a single character s voice or thoughts.

13 Narration and Point of View A first-person narrator describes the action from his or her own perspective (using the pronoun I). First-person narrators sometimes address an auditor, an audience within the fiction whose possible reaction is part of the story.

14 Narration and Point of View Less frequently, events are narrated in the first person plural (using the pronoun we) or in the second person (using the pronoun you). When we as readers are skeptical of a narrator s point of view and judge his or her flaws or misperceptions, we call that narrator unreliable.

15 Narration and Point of View Stories are most often narrated in the past tense, but the use of the present tense has become more common in contemporary fiction. It is sometimes tempting to identify the narrator with the author of the story, but it is generally more productive to think in terms of the implied author, the voice or figure of the author who designs the story and creates the narrator who tells it.

16 Character A character is someone who acts, appears, or is referred to as playing a part in a literary work, usually fiction or drama. The leading male character is sometimes called the hero; his opponent is sometimes called the villain; and the leading female character is sometimes called the heroine. Heroes and heroines tend to be portrayed as stronger or better than the average human being.

17 Character A more neutral term for the leading character is protagonist; a protagonist s opponent is called an antagonist. Most modern fiction focuses on characters who are more like ordinary people. Such characters are sometimes called antiheroes, not because they oppose the hero but because they do not manifest any outstanding strength or virtue.

18 Character Major or main characters are those whose qualities are described and developed most thoroughly over the course of the plot. Minor characters are secondary figures who round out the story. A foil is a character who serves as a contrast to the protagonist.

19 Character Round characters are characters who or act from conflicting or changing motives. Their complexity often makes them seem more realistic than flat characters, who behave in unchanging or unsurprising ways. Dynamic characters are those that change over the course of a story; those that don t are called static characters.

20 Character The terms round versus flat and dynamic versus static should not be used as value judgments. Flat characters may be less complex than round ones, but their characterization is not necessarily artistically or aesthetically inferior. Flat characters who represent a familiar, frequently recurring type are called stock characters.

21 Character Types of characters that appear in literature across ages and cultures are called archetypes. It is necessary to recognize that fictional characters are not real people, but keep in mind that the representation of people in fiction can provide insight into and provoke debate about fundamental qualities of human nature.

22 Character Characterization is the art and technique of representing fictional personages. The two main methods for presenting character are direct characterization and indirect characterization. Using direct characterization, the narrator explicitly tells the reader what a character is like; with indirect characterization, readers must infer what a character is like from his or her actions and dialogue.

23 Setting The setting of a story includes the temporal setting, or plot time (when the story takes place), and the spatial setting (where the story takes place). General setting is the time period and the rough location in which the story is set. Particular settings include specific dates and times or locations for events in the story. Setting can provide historical or cultural context for the action, set an emotional tone, and evoke certain associations in readers minds.

24 Symbol A symbol is something that stands for something else. In literature, the association between a symbol and what it symbolizes is usually subtle and many-layered. A symbol usually conveys an abstraction or a cluster of abstractions.

25 Symbol A traditional symbol is a familiar one that has been used by many writers over a long time. Archetypes are pervasive literary elements (for example plots, characters, objects, or settings) that recur in stories across cultures and over long periods of time. Writers can also invent fresh symbols. If a symbol does not have a familiar association with what it represents, the work must provide clues to its significance. The context of an entire work can guide you in how far to push your sense of whether a metaphor has the deeper significance of a symbol.

26 Symbol A single item in a story becomes a symbol only when its potentially symbolic meaning is confirmed by something else in the story. An allegory is an extended series of symbols that encompasses a whole work.

27 Symbol When an entire story is allegorical or symbolic, it is sometimes called a myth. This term originally referred to stories of communal origin that provided a religious explanation of an event or situation, but today we often employ it to imply that a story expresses experiences or truths that are shared by a community or that extend beyond any one culture and time. Like other figures of speech, symbols are most effective when they cannot be neatly translated into an abstract phrase, when their meaning remains elusive or difficult to articulate.

28 Symbol Figures of speech (or figurative language) create imaginative connections between our ideas and our senses or reveal striking similarities between things we do not normally associate with one another. A simile is an explicit comparison, often signaled by like or as.

29 Symbol A metaphor is an implicit comparison or identification of one thing with another, without a verbal signal such as like or as. An extended metaphor is a detailed and complex metaphor that stretches through most of a work and underscores its themes.

30 Theme A story s theme is its central idea, thesis, or message. Themes are not always clear or unified. Different readers may have different and entirely reasonable and compelling interpretations of a story s theme. The word theme is sometimes used loosely to refer to a story s topic or subject, but it more specifically refers to what the story has to say about that topic.

31 Theme Deciphering your own interpretation of a theme can require multiple readings and always requires careful attention to all the elements of literature (plot, point of view, character, symbols, and language). To locate a theme is not to close off further analysis or interpretation of a story. Rather, it should trigger deeper investigation into the details that make a story vivid and unique.