Plot Prose

Plot

Plot is the sequence of incidents or events of which a story is composed. Just as a map may be drawn on a finer or grosser scale, so a plot may be recounted with lesser or greater detail. It may include what a character says or thinks.

Conceivably a plot might consist merely of a sequence of related actions. Ordinarly, in plot there are some conflict. The conflicy may be physycal, mental, emotional or moral.

The central character in conflict, wether he be a sympathic or an unsympathetic person, is referred to as protagonist. The forces, arrayed against him. Wether persons, things, conventions ofsociety, or traits of his own character  are the antagonist. In some stories the conflict is single, clear cut, and easily identifiable. In anothers it is multiple, various, and subtle. In cheap fiction this conflict is usually clearly defined in terms of white versus black. In interpretative fiction, the contrasts are likely to be less marked. Good may be opposed to good or half-truth to half-truth.

            Suspense is the equality in a story that makes the reader ask “what going to happen next?”. It greatest when reader’s curiousity is combined with anxiety about the fate of some sympathetic character. Thus in the old serial movies, suspense was created at the end of each episode by leaving the hero hanging from the edge of a cliff or the heroine tied to the railroad traccks with the express train rapidly approaching.

In “the most dangerous game” suspense is initated in the opening sentences with whitney’s account of the mystery of “ship-trap island. The mystery grows when, in this out of the way spot, rainsford discovers an enermous chateau with a leering gargoyle knocker on its massive door and is confronted by a bearded giant pointing a long barreled revolver straight at his hearth. A second mystery is intoduced when general zaroff tells rainsford that he hunts “more dangerous game”. Meanwhile, by placing the hero in phsycal danger, a second kind of suspense is introducted.

Suspense is usually the first quality mentioned by a young reader when asked what makes a good story.

            In the short story such radical departure is most often found in a suprise ending. On the other hand, the ending that comes at first as a suprise seems perfectly logical and natural as we look back over the story, we may grant it as fairly achieved. Wheter or not a story has suprise ending, the beginning reader usually demands that it have a happy ending, the protagonist must solve his problems, defeat the villain, win the girl, “live happily ever after”.

The discriminating reader evaluates an ending not by wether it is happy or unhappy but by wether it is logical in terms of what precedes it and by the fullness of revelation it affords. In real life some problems are never solved and some contests never permanently won. A story, therefore, may have an indeterminate ending, one in which no definitive conclusion is arrived at.

            One feels not that the author is managing the plot but rather that the plot haas a quality of inevitability, given a certain set of characters and an initial situation. In life almost any concatenation of events is possible in a story the sequence oe events should be probable.

            The are various approaches to the analysis of plot. We may, if we wish, draw diagrams of different kond of plots or trace the development of rising action, climax, and falling action. It useful to examine how the incidents and episodes are connected. Plot by itself gives little more indication of the total story than a map gives of the quality of a journey.