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... you a table of contents and an epigraph, movies have credits, plays dim lights and open curtains, the Beowulf poet yells "Heart!" and so on. The development proceeds as the narrative gets underway, and the characters learn and do things, and have things done to them. Here "the plot thickens, " perhaps with various sorts of queries, intrigue, and suspense, the piling up of one enigma or dilemma after another. The development portion of the narrative is generally characterised by a kind of alternation of delays or digressions, which impede our arriving at the conclusion, and scenes of progression, which advance towards the conclusion. This alternation (if we may call it that) often works on our sense of expectation and anticipation, sometimes satisfying us, sometimes not.
Often, as Aristotle indicated, the development will include one or more scenes of recognition (anagnorisis), which is when a character recognises (is made to recognise) the truth, and also one or more scenes of reversal (peripeteia), which is when a character changes state from one thing to its opposite, as for example from prosperous to impoverished. For Aristotle, the finest tragedies were those composed so that the events lead inexorably to a scene in which the central character experiences both a major recognition and a major reversal at one and the same moment: as when Oedipus learns the truth about his life. The conclusion ties it all up. The end is what the whole story has been leading towards. Here is the solution of the mystery in mystery stories, and the resolution of various enigmas and dilemmas that have characterised the development portion of the narrative. The structuring power of the ending is immense, since it bestows the final meaning on the events, and is what everything in the narrative has (apparently) led up to.
That is how we conveniently, and traditionally, think of narrative structure. Narrative conventions tend to cluster around certain types of narratives within certain cultures, so that what is normal and expected in one narrative may be abnormal and unexpected in another. In Greek tragedy actors wore masks which carried symbolic import. In Elizabethan theatre men played women's roles, since women were not permitted (or expected) to appear on stage. Also in Elizabethan theatre, characters would deliver soliloquies to the audience revealing the state of their thinking, and also deliver asides to the audience, which the audience understands, are not heard by the other characters. Many conventions accumulate in particular genres.
In westerns the "white hat = good guy" formula, or the cavalry charge to save the day at the end, were conventions readily understood and accepted by audiences. In detective fiction the convention of the private investigator, a person working alone rather than within an institution like the police, became standard. These formulae, which include the larger "boy meets girl... " kind of thing, are often so common we fail to recognise them as conventions, which is usually how it is "supposed" to be. A particularly important narrative convention concerns the supposed truth of a story. We know that many (most? ) stories are really not true in the sense that they really happened that way, but we expect to be led on by the convention, and by what Coleridge called the "willing suspension of disbelief. " There are various modes by which this convention is manifest, including the general tendencies towards the "realist" or the "fantastic. " One of Shakespeare's sonnets opens: "When my love swears that she is made of truth/I do believe her, though I know she lies. " One could almost say the same thing for the relationship between reader or audience and the narrative.
The term "narrative" is so broad it can get confusing (and, in any case, we often, quite properly, refer to "story" and "plot" without drawing on the distinctions made above, yet we all know what we are talking about... ). The conventions of the Elizabethan theatre are, of course, dramatic conventions as well as narrative conventions. It is important to recognise, however, the fundamental differences in form between stories that are performed on stage and those that are narrated in a book of prose fiction. (Let us leave aside the narratives of film and other media, to say nothing those that play around in our heads... ) We have made the distinction between story and plot to draw our attention to plot as the ordering (re-ordering) of events. Othello begins after (albeit just after) Othello has married Desdemona. Parts of the play, notably Othello's long reminiscences of their courtship in 1. 3, but also much of Iago's opening dialogue, refer to events that have previously happened.
The story of Othello, of course, would begin ("at the beginning, " wherever that is) and proceed to the end. The plot, however, re-orders the events to suit the dramatic action. But nobody tells, nobody narrates, the story of Othello. It is performed for us on stage by actors playing the characters. We learn things in a drama by many things, including what characters look like, what they do, how they do things, and principally by what they say, how they say things, and what others say about those things, and how they say them. In a prose narrative, of course, we learn because a narrator tells us these things.
Big difference. We (as humans) have a (natural, human) tendency to provide order to things. Our minds and our visual (sensual) apparatus appear to be shaped (to have evolved) to make sense of things by eliminating what appears to be unnecessary and by making assumptions about how things fit together -- hence stories. One of the primary ways we make sense of a story is by making sense of the narrator, that is, by assuming that the narrator is a relatively sane and sound individual person (often, conventionally, male, though this is by no means always the case), who knows what he or she is talking about, that is, who has special powers that enable him (her) to know and report things like what characters are thinking or planning, what they do when they are alone, and other things that ordinarily we do not know unless we are told by someone who does. We know that people lie, and we know that many stories are "made up, " but we do not usually expect the narrator to lie deliberately to us -- unless it is part of the joke. In making these assumptions about the narrator, we tend to share what narrators themselves (in their role as authors) often believe as well.
These are among the narrative conventions we discussed above. But we may miss much in a story if we blindly (or, inattentively) read along without noting that the telling of the story is a part of the story (I am using the word story here in the common, generic sense, like narrative, but also like plot, and like, well, story... ).
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Research essay sample on One Or More Scenes Story And Plot Narrative
