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THE NORTON INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE Tenth Edition
Allison Booth ● Kelly J. Mays
FICTION: Understanding
the Text
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
FICTION: Understanding the Text
• This section introduces you to the elements of
fiction and provides you with tips for analyzing
and interpreting them.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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).
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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).
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
©2010 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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.
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