DRAFT
December 8, 2005
Please do not quote for publication
Analyzing Plot
Chapter One
The Guides for Analyzing a Plot
The way of approaching plot described in this book begins with a few guidelines.
Sometimes they are self-evident (readers experience plot), and sometimes they are
arguable (what is a reader?). I am going to set aside some of those arguments for the
present, because behind some of them lie assumptions which will be my subject later on.
The nature of self-identity, for example, changes with the kinds of worlds we imagine,
and analyzing narrative will lead us to consideration of those worlds and what it means to
be a reader in them.
My claim is that the approach I will describe is highly generalizable, and not just
for all kinds of narrative literature, from sitcoms to War and Peace. Whatever has
narrative organization—some historical accounts and biographies, psychoanalytic case
histories, some dreams, religious projections of the future of humankind—will yield
insights to the approach.
The analysis which the guidelines makes possible is the beginning but not the end
of the consideration of plot. In this chapter I explain the guidelines. In the following
chapter I discuss the basic causal modes of plots. The balance of the book gives
examples of the kinds of narratives and the kinds of plots to be found there. The book is
meant to equip you to analyze any plot, fictional or not, from any time and culture.
Ten Guiding Assertions for Analysis of Plot
1. A plot is an experience of a reader, not of a character.
2. Plots move from the first word to the last in reader’s time.
3. A plot is a reader’s experience of change.
4. Plots build a sense of meaning.
5. Plots take place in a narrative world.
6. With the completion of a plot, the narrative world is more orderly than it was at the
beginning of the plot.
7. All full plots reach a state of unstable equilibrium toward the middle.
8. Full plots do not look like pyramids.
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9. Full plots look like snakes, with low points of order on either side of the middle.
10. The reason plots look like the plot snake may be that they describe the process of a
full life.
To Explain the Assertions
1. A plot is an experience of a reader, not of a character. It might seem that many
characters’ experiences are busy in a plot, with all of the characters having their own
stories as implied if not explicit presences in the narrative. Because characters hook our
interest we naturally move toward one of their points of view when we try to analyze the
process of a plot. But there is only one mind which can see the story whole (if it can be
seen whole at all), and that is the reader’s. Plot is a property of a whole work. Characters
may have their own experiences of a plot (as we imagine them), and may act out plots we
can disentangle from the work, but only a reader can have an experience of a whole work.
2. Plots move from the first word to the last in reader’s time. (Of course, that
may be the first motion of a narrative dance, or the first frame of a film.)
We may find out something in the middle of a work which happened before the
work began. So far as we are concerned, though, the event has its impact when we
discover it. For the plot it does not matter when an event occurs in the world of the work.
What matters is when it enters our experience. A character may reveal something that the
character has known for a long time. It takes its place in the plot when we discover it.
Many plots, particularly in recent years, repeat events with variations or from
different characters’ differing points of view, with their differing powers of memory.
The plot, if there be one at all, is composed of our sense of the parade of those variations.
The distinction between a reconstructible sequence of events and the surface
sequence presented in a narrative was first worked out by the Russian formalists in the
1930s. Since then a great deal has been written about time in narratives. The analysis of
plot, however, deals with the events as they are presented to us, not as we can rearrange
them in some historical order.
In many narratives from antiquity on, the plotted pleasure of a work can arise
from our acts of reconstruction. For example, we find out only toward the middle of
Oedipus Tyrannus that Oedipus has murdered a man who may have been his own father.
No matter how many times we read Oedipus Tyrannus, we must experience anew the
discovery of the circumstances of the murder of Oedipus’s father if we are to experience
the play at all fully. In the reconstructible sequence of events, the murder has occurred
before the beginning of the play, but in the plot, we discover the circumstances as the
characters do.
3. A plot is a reader’s experience of change. Change is what plot is about—
change from a relatively disorderly to a relatively orderly situation. To analyze plot is to
become aware of the ways in which we are experiencing change.
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4. Plots build a sense of meaning. The change must be meaningful to be a part of
a plot. Meaningless change undoes plot. Plot, then, has to do with cause and effect, as E.
M. Forster famously observed:
“Let us define a plot. We have defined a story as a narrative of events
arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling
on causality. ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then
the queen died of grief’ is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of
causality overshadows it. Or again: ‘The queen died, no one knew why, until it was
discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.’ This is a plot with a
mystery in it, a form capable of high development. It suspends the time-sequence, it
moves as far away from the story as its limitations will allow. Consider the death of the
queen. If it is in a story we say ‘and then?’ If it is in a plot we ask ‘why?’ That is the
fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel.” (Page 86)
It may be true, as some have said, that when we hear that the king died and then
the queen, we do not need to know why to begin to imagine that there may be a causal
connection between the two. That is, we habitually tend to construe meanings, to make
plots from stories. Still, Forster’s distinction is useful in understanding the difference
between journalism and plotted narration. To understand a newspaper account is simply
to understand its version of what happened. To understand a novel is to apprehend a set
of meaningful changes (or to register and appreciate their meaninglessness).
What is more, the fundamental kinds of plot arise from the basic ways we imagine
meaning arising from the connections among events—that is, the kinds of relationships
among causes and effects. Those ways are the plot modes, and there are exactly five of
them. But that is for later in the book.
5. Plots take place in a narrative world. The narrative world is that implied and
constructed by the narrative, and in which the story unfolds. It exists in our experience of
the text and is made possible by it. Sometimes no immediately discernible difference
exists between the narrative world and our own, but plot analysis can always yield
statements about ways in which the narrative world limits itself in the kinds of experience
it can encompass. In a way, the narrative world is there to allow certain kinds of
experience and to prohibit others. That is the major way a narrative world differs from
what we might call the world of absolute experience, the world beyond narrative.
6. With the completion of a plot, the narrative world is more orderly than it was
at the beginning of the plot. The work of plot is generally to posit some disruption of a
narrative world and then, through the process of the plot, to achieve a state of events
which accommodates the disruption. Because the narrative world has successfully
absorbed the disruption it is more powerfully ordered than it was before. Any suggestion
of a sequence of similar disruptions to be managed in the future moves toward undoing
the sense of closure in a plot.
7. All full plots reach a state of unstable equilibrium toward the middle. In his
Poetics Aristotle observes that plots have beginnings, middles, and ends. He uses the
metaphor of a knot: the first half of a plot ties a knot and the last half unties it. The
unstable equilibrium of the tied knot in the middle of the plot, the climax, does in fact
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characterize plots, and has been the most widely applied observation of the Aristotelian
tradition for analyzing plot.
Plots begin with a disruption and toward the middle reach what seems to be a
solution to what seems to be the problem. Cinderella wants to go to a ball and Odysseus
wants to return to Ithaca. Toward the middle of their narratives they get what they want.
Oedipus wants to find out who killed Laius; at the climax of Oedipus Tyrannus he
discovers who did (and it was him).
But Aristotle’s metaphor of the plot knot wars with successful analysis. It implies
that the plot develops in a straight line to the climax, and that the whole business of the
last part of the narrative will be to undo the climax. Such is not the case.
8. Full plots do not look like pyramids. Early commentaries on Aristotle
extended the comments of the Poetics to describe a model of plot form: an induction,
which sets the scene; a development, leading to a climax, followed by a denouement and
finally a catastrophe. The modern statement of the tradition began with Gustav Freytag, a
German critic and theorist of drama who in the mid-nineteenth century described plot as a
pyramid. Freytag’s pyramid is still widely taught as the standard model of plot; it is
mentioned by most of those literary scholars who comment on plot form. It is taught, it is
mentioned, and then it is dropped. It is of little use in analyzing actual plots because
plots do not work that way. Important stages escape analysis when we try to imagine the
plot of an actual work as a straight ascent to a climax and a straight descent to a
catastrophe.
9. Full plots look like snakes, with low points of order on either side of the
middle. Plots move in reader’s time to construct order. If we sketch a plot in these two
dimensions, (reader’s) time and order, it will look like this:
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Figure One: General Plot Form
Order →
6
5
3
1
2
4
4
Reader’s time →
1.
2.
3.
4.
Initiation Burnt Temporary Infernal
Fingers Binding
Vision
5.
6.
Final
Termination
Binding
Fig. 1. Plot Snake with General Process Stages. Adapted from Allen Tilley, Plot Snakes
and the Dynamics of Narrative Experience (Gainesville: UP of FL, 1992), Fig. 1, p.3
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Stage one, the initiation, begins with the first word and proceeds until the turn to
stage two, at the top of the first rise. In the intiation some actual or prospective change
threatens (or has already began threatening) a stable narrative world. In the second stage,
burnt fingers, the threat to order makes itself felt in a seemingly random and confused
way. “Burnt fingers” carries the sense that characters are encountering surprises, often
unpleasant ones, as they confront dangers they do not yet understand. In fact, at this
early stage of the plot the dangers often seem to lack any organization at all. The
confusion generally spreads until the plot turns toward stage three, the temporary binding.
The turn will be the point at which the temporary binding becomes the direction of
events. Usually, it is the point at which the temporary binding becomes possible.
With the temporary binding the energies which are disturbing the world of the
plot seem—at least, seem—to take some form which makes them manageable. Perhaps
characters simply escape the turmoil, or perhaps they come up with some stratagem
which they hope will deal with the difficulties which have beset them, or satisfy the
desires which arouse them. They are doomed to disappointment, as the temporary
bindings are always, in the end, unsatisfactory and ineffective.
The turn from the temporary binding to the infernal vision is at the top of the
middle rise. At that point, the instability of the temporary binding manifests itself and the
central threat to order in the plot emerges. It does its worst until the lowest level of order
in the work, the turn to stage five, the final binding. In that turn whatever solution the
plot affords for the difficulties of the plot does its work. When it has finished, at the top
of the last rise, the plot turns toward stage six, termination, which reestablishes a stable
world which will continue beyond the end of the work. (Unless, of course, the final
binding involved the end of the world—truly apocalyptic plots may lack a termination.)
In terms of the order in Oedipus’s narrative world, things fall apart most when he
discovers that in murdering Laius he has murdered his father and married his mother, all
unwittingly. That is his infernal vision, the turn from stage four to stage five, and leads to
his mother’s suicide and his own self-blinding and exile by Creon, which constitute the
final binding, stage five. The murderer of Laius (Oedipus) has been discovered and
banished, as the oracle demanded. Oedipus’s leavetaking constitutes the termination,
stage six. The end of Oedipus Tyrannus is more orderly than the beginning, when a
plague of unknown origin was preventing all generation in Thebes. The possibility of the
succession of generations is restored.
The plague is the initiation of the plot. It is the disruption of the formerly orderly
narrative world which the plot must accommodate.
The runners from the oracle of Apollo announce that to end the plague Laius’s
murderer must be caught. This turn to the second stage, burnt fingers, leads to Oedipus’s
interrogation of Tiresias, the blind seer who knows but will not name the murderer. With
its dark hints from Tiresias and threats of violence by Oedipus, the interrogation tears at
the civil peace of Thebes until it sets Oedipus against Creon, his brother-in-law and most
valuable official. The orderly society of Thebes is coming undone. Notice that events at
this stage of the play cannot usefully be imagined as a straight line to the climax.
The turn to the temporary binding, the third stage, comes with the arrival of
Jocasta, who is able to calm Oedipus. The third stage is relatively brief. It leads to her
revelation that Laius was killed by a stranger where three roads meet. She means to calm
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Oedipus but instead has unwittingly informed him that he is the murderer for whom he
has been searching.
Oedipus’s drive to discover the full truth of the situation leads him along the
descent of the fourth stage, the infernal vision, to the terrible news from the shepherd and
the messenger: Oedipus is not who he thought he was, and has acted out a terrible
prophecy which he fled Corinth to escape. In the final binding stage the revelation has its
effect—suicide and mutilation. With the blinded Oedipus’s reentry before Creon the plot
moves to termination, the reestablishment of an orderly world which will continue
beyond the end of the play. Oedipus is banished from Thebes, now purged, and Creon
will rule.
We know that Oedipus’s sons will not be able to share power, that a devastating
war will ensue. We also know that Oedipus’s daughters and Oedipus himself are due for
a dramatic future. Antigone has her own tragedy to play out, and Oedipus is more
blessed than he can now know. To the extent that the energies of the play are unsatisfied
the plot is unbound. But in this play, the primary disruption, the plague and, behind it,
the unwitting patricide and incest, have been revealed and accommodated, so that the plot
achieves sufficient closure to satisfy readers.
The general plot process I have described for Oedipus Tyrannus will serve to
account for every full plot which comes to closure (though not all do, as I shall describe
later). Partial plots, such as brief anecdotes and jokes, look more like Freytag’s pyramid,
or like a straight march to a punch line. But full plots which come to closure, from
whatever context of culture, time, race, and gender, look like the plot snake.
Or so I claim, as unlikely as that may seem. I hope you will entertain for the
present discussion the possibility that it may be so.
10. The reason plots look like the plot snake may be that they describe the
process of a full life. The regularity and persistence of plot, the way in which the six
stages organize narratives from ancient plays to tonight’s situation comedy, asks for an
explanation.
Life initiates with a birth. The turn to the second stage comes when we achieve
some independence from our parents and are able to move around the world on our own,
about our sixth year. We are at that point headed for adolescence. The stages have
biological markers; the end of the second stage and the turn to the third is marked by
puberty, when our personality comes more or less unglued and reforms itself around the
goal of the temporary binding of life, achievement of adult status. The biological marker
is birth of children, but whatever marks adult status will do as the high point of order in
the middle of life’s plot snake.
In spite of what teenagers think, adult status is not the end of life. The infernal
vision of our life is the point at which we realize that friends, job, and family will not
save us from the death which lies ahead. The biological marker of the infernal vision is
menopause, at least for about half of us. (The male climacteric is still in dispute.) In the
turn from the infernal vision to the final binding, we move out of the chaos of midlife to
an acceptance of our life’s shape, or at least to a viewpoint from which we can recognize
the shape of what we have done and become.
Death is of course the biological marker of our final binding phase of life. It
might seem that if the life-cycle were behind plot, more plots would end with a sense of
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devastating waste or emptiness, for death often seems that way to us—an empty waste.
But that is not necessarily the way death comes. Studies of the death experience show
that few deaths come in panicked pain. From the vantage point of a full life, if ever, we
can see life whole. Of course, if we are to attain that vantage, it will likely be somewhat
before death. Most people at their very end are too busy dying to take philosophical
notice of anything about their life. At least in our stories, though, we imagine a
viewpoint from which we can see life whole, even if the view is tragic. Often it is not.
The midlife transition is the point at which we seem most strangers in the world,
out of place in our lives. The things we have built our lives around no longer sustain us.
In old age we again take our places in the continuity of experience, and have a chance to
become at home again in the world.
The sixth stage, termination, names whatever continues beyond a death—society
moving on beyond us, an afterlife, persistence in the memories or the lineage of those left
behind. The termination imagines a world augmented by the life now passed.
Plot form is ancient, and may as easily be discerned in Gilgamesh (our plot of
most ancient record, about four thousand years ago) as in modern narratives. Some
people overly impressed with the claims of modernity imagine people lived only short
lives until recently. In whatever ancient source you choose, however, a full life is
represented as having the full complement of stages and cannot be said to be complete
until at least the seventh decade. It is so in the Bible and in Plato and in Confucius.
Infant mortality, childhood diseases, warfare, and the dangers of childbirth have held the
average lifespan down in the past but those who succeed in weaving past the dangers
lived full lives as today, and were examples to their communities.
Not very many plots end with literal death. More probably end with a marriage or
some other marker of an achievement in the stream of life. If my guess is right, though,
behind the form of all full plots which come to closure lies the pattern of a full life.
I cannot tell the story of my life until it is too late for me to tell it. But through
narrative I can imagine the shape of the whole. So we seem to do, in infinite variation,
practicing again and again the full shape of our experience.
Supplementary Notes
Chapter one, Plot Form. The system presented here is one I have developed in
two books: Plot Snakes and the Dynamics of Narrative Experience (Gainesville: UP of
Florida, 1992), and Plots of Time: An Inquiry into History, Myth, and Meaning
(Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1995). I do not assume acquaintance with either of these
here. In fact, I believe the books will be easier to read if you start with this one, for in the
previous books I have been at pains to develop and defend the theory and to show its
relationship to past treatments of plot. In this book I omit that and must refer you to the
previous two for such matters as the history of Freytag’s Pyramid and the controversy
over the male climacteric.
A recent and most useful introduction to narrative theory in general is H. Porter
Abbott’s The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002).
My books are not represented but it is a good survey nonetheless.
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The edition of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel I have quoted was printed in
New York in 1955 by Harcourt, Brace, & World Inc. The passage comes a couple of
pages into his Chapter Five, “The Plot.” The book was written in 1927, and is still much
worth reading for its good sense and insights.
The whole idea of plot as a dynamic system I derived from an NEH summer
seminar with Peter Brooks, who was at the time working on Reading for the Plot: Design
and Intention in Narrative (New York: Knopf, 1984). The idea is especially developed in
his chapter “Freud’s Masterplot.”
Some thoughts about entropy and plot: In thermodynamics, a closed system—in
our case, a narrative world—always becomes less orderly with time. The more entropy a
system has, the less information we have about it and the less orderly it is. A hot cup of
coffee in a closed room cools. The heat is still there but more randomly dispersed as the
coffee cools. Entropy describes the dispersion of that heat.
Plots work in the opposite way. With the passage of reader’s time, from frame to
frame of a film or word to word of a novel, the narrative world is on its way to increased
order (or this is a narrative which is out to defeat plot, as some are).
By Boltzman’s formula the entropy of a physical system may be exactly measured
and expressed. I know of no way to do that for a narrative.
In two ways, then, a narrative is a bad fit for the laws of thermodynamics: entropy
lessens over time to the extent that a plot comes to closure, and the growth in order may
be sensed and described but not measured. (At least, not so far as I know.)
The world is a bad fit for the laws of entropy for exactly the same reasons. Over
the past four and a half billion years the earth has become more highly organized. It has
gone from a relatively simple world of the basic elements to the present swarm of highly
organized living beings. A rat is more highly organized than a palm tree; in time, the
rats, and we with them, have joined the palm trees in the world. What is more, we have
no way to measure exactly that increase in complexity.
This view (of the increasing complexity of the ecosystem) is usually regarded as
superficial because the world has received an excess of energy from the sun for all those
four and a half billion years. That excess energy has driven entropy backwards, into
negentropy and an increase in complexity. Physicists assure us that if we stick around
long enough for the sun to go out we shall observe that on a sufficiently long time scale
the laws of entropy will assert themselves and the world will proceed to become simple
indeed. The world itself is due to dissolve in time.
The entropy of a narrative plot which comes to closure works on human time
scales, those we can observe on the scale of a lifetime. On those scales the energies of
plot may be accommodated or, as Peter Brooks has said, bound by events.
Many may say, so much for plot, and so much for our narratives. They only serve
to create the illusion of a future. But the deep need for meaning which drives plot may be
more than a need to deny death; it may be a hint of the timelessness of the achievements
of time. William Blake thought so: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”
Plots sometimes do, and sometimes do not, look beyond death.
Beginnings and endings are great mysteries. In our experience, nothing begins
from absolutely nowhere or ends with no sequel whatsoever. So with plot, really. About
the only way for a plot to truly begin at the beginning is to start as medieval chronicles
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customarily did, with the beginning of the world. And the only end which is final
imagines the cessation of time. Neither is wholly accessible to our imaginations.
In the past I have used entropy as a metaphor for plot process, and called the
vertical dimension of my plot snake by that name. I have come to believe that finally I
must drop the entropy metaphor. For plot, the achievement of order accounts for
something, even if we are left the annihilated worlds of Oedipus Tyrannus or King Lear.
Thermodynamics has no way to recognize lessons learned, secrets revealed, or realities
faced. Our sense of plot does.