The Plot Twist

A Charming Way to Fascinate the Reader

“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.”

FREDRIC BROWN, KNOCK

These are the first two sentences of the short story Knock, written by American writer Fredric

Brown (1906 – 1972). They represent only the beginning of the story, but the image evoked by

those seventeen words is so powerful that the story may finish right there, without any further

development. Why are we so attracted by these two sentences though? Many answers are possible,

but, most likely, the main reason is the plot twist placed in the second part of this “short-short”

story.

In this paper, the plot twist is the main topic that will be examined, but, before analysing its

features, we must primarily focus on the theories of literature in order to identify those aspects that

make a good story and, consequently, a good plot twist. To do that, an introduction of Aristotle’s

notions about the plot will be presented, followed by Edgar Allan Poe’s statements about short

fiction and personal reflections on the use of the plot twist in the short story narrative with a focus

on two of the works of Poe and Fredric Brown.

1. What makes a good story? How Aristotle’s Poetics influence the

“worldbuilding”

The plot twist is known to be an unexpected turn of the events that have been presented in the

story so far and this is exactly what we face in the second sentence of Brown’s story. The knocking

on the door leads us to ask a series of questions: how is it possible that someone knocked on the
1
door if humanity is extinguished? Maybe not all of it? Maybe someone survived the Apocalypse

that wiped out human race? What if the one who is knocking is not a person, but a “something”? An

alien? A monster? It is not important, though, to know who or what knocked at the door. Some

readers are probably more interested in knowing how the story goes on, while most of them are

attracted to the doubt created by the second question. In this case we can confirm we face a

successful twist.

Not all plot twists are good, though. In order to be successful, a plot twist should be inserted in a

story that has shared enough information about the world in which it is set, otherwise it may result

in a failed attempt to impress the reader. Given the idea that a plot twist is good if the story itself is

compelling, we need to identify which are the main features that make a story successful. The first

author who dealt with this aspect of narration was Aristotle; with his theories of literature, he

anticipated many modern essayists. In his Poetics, he gives instructions on how to create a good

story, according to various principles, some of them survived through the ages, while others were

replaced by new innovations in literature. Though his indications are based primarily on the

structure of the tragedy it is possible to apply them to different types of narrations. In fact, Aristotle

states that a tragedy is well written, when it respects the three unities of drama: time, place and

action.1 It may be deemed anachronistic to refer to those elements nowadays, especially if we think

that, for him, the length of the story should not be longer than a day; it fits perfectly for drama in

ancient Greece, but not for a modern fiction.

Nevertheless, the use of the three Aristotelian units can be regarded as a first attempt towards the

construction of a coherent world in which to set stories, a task that most modern writers need to

undertake before and during the development of their narratives and that nowadays takes the name

of “worldbuilding”. This process consists in the creation of an imaginary world with its rules and

exceptions. It is a fundamental step in the writing of stories that belong to a genre characterized by

1
The three unities refer mainly to the Greek tragedy. Indeed, most of the works of the greatest authors, such as
Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, have in common those elements. These stories are usually solved in a day, set in a
single place and they avoid dealing with subplots.
2
fantastic elements, such as fantasy, science fiction, cyberpunk and others. For example, if a fantasy

describes a world in which there is magic, the author must describe how it works. The lack of

information, in this case, will result in questions from the reader, who will sometimes happen to

find discrepancies in the narration, and try creating alternative solutions for the characters’

problems by himself, solutions that, maybe, the author himself did not take into account. Indeed,

many questions in fantasy stories do not find a real answer as the world created by the author is

often too complicated, governed by many rules and subject to too many exceptions. The latter may

also result in plot holes, if the author does not provide the reader with further explanation. For

example, in the Harry Potter saga, J. K. Rowling introduces in the third book, The Prisoner of

Azkaban, the idea of time travel through the use of the Time Turner, a magical artefact which is

used to solve the problems encountered by the protagonists in that chapter of the saga. The readers

asked themselves if this device could be used to travel further in time and, in this way, solve all the

characters’ problems. J. K. Rowling tried to give some further explanation of how this magical item

works, but she did not convince her readers at all. For this reason, in the fifth book of the saga, The

Order of the Phoenix, she decided to insert a scene where all the Time Turners ended up being

destroyed, so as not to be forced to address the issue any further. That is why a writer must always

be careful when introducing new aspects of a plot.

Besides the three unities of the tragedy, Aristotle identifies three key elements in a plot: the

hamartia, the anagnorisis and the peripeteia.

The hamartia means a ‘sin’ or ‘fault’ (which in tragic drama is often the product of the fatal

character defect which came to be known as the ‘tragic flaw’). The anagnorisis means

‘recognition’ or ‘realisation’, that being a moment in the narrative when the truth of the

situation is recognised by the protagonist – often it’s a moment of self-recognition. The

3
 peripeteia means a ‘turn-round’ or a reversal of fortune. In classical tragedy this is usually a fall

from high to low estate, as the hero fall from greatness. 2

As the anagnorisis and the peripeteia usually refer to moments of the narration in which the

characters face a situation that may go against everything they had gone through so far, we may

associate them to the idea of Plot Twist. In her article, Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative

Design, when analysing Aristotle, Marie-Laurie Ryan focuses mainly on the anagnorisis and the

peripeteia, providing us with an example:

In his treatment of tragedy Aristotle sketches a catalogue of good and bad ways to construct

plot. He posits as pivotal to the tragic plot two types of event: reversal of fortune and scenes of

recognition (anagnorisis), through which characters pass from ignorance to knowledge. (Plots

are even better when both events occur at the same time, as in Oedipus Rex.). 3

The story of Oedipus, king of Thebes, is one of the oldest stories to present a plot twist. In the

Greek myth Oedipus discovers only at the end of the narration that he has killed his father, Laius,

king of Thebes, and that his wife, Jocasta, is also his mother. The fact that Marie-Laurie Ryan refers

to the passage from ignorance to knowledge faced by the characters is not casual: in fact, we need

to differentiate the information the authors share with us from the one they share with their

characters. Though the reader knows about Oedipus and Jocasta’s blood relationship since the

beginning of the story, the revelation is still a strong moment of the narration, one that leaves the

viewer speechless, not only because it is a taboo, but also because we have waited for a long time to

see this twist. As Peter Barry highlights:

2
P. Barry, Beginning Theory. An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, Second Edition, Manchester UP,
Manchester and New York, 2009, p. 216.
3
M. Ryan, “Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative Design”, Narrative, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Jan. 2009), p. 57.
4
 Indeed, we might say that the key to storytelling is not the imparting, but the withholding of

information – readers often know things that characters don’t, and vice-versa, and narrators

keep things back from both. The central mechanism in stories in delay, to be specific, delay in

imparting this information – the Victorian novelist Wilkie Collins famously said that the

formula for writing a successful novel is ‘Make them laugh, make them cry – make them wait’. 4

All these elements suggest that the ending of a story acquires significant relevance as it must

give all the answers the characters, and the readers, are looking for. The author must consider every

information he had dispensed in the plot and use them to give full closure to the story.

2. The importance of the ending: the plot twist in Edgar Allan Poe’s The

Black Cat and Fredric Brown’s Nightmare in Yellow.

The first author who tried to analyse this aspect of the short story, which he considered as

belonging to their own genre, was Edgar Allan Poe. He stated that the differences between this kind

of narration and the longer ones were not only in the length, but also in the atmosphere, the mood of

the stories. Poe’s ideas are relevant as they operate a shift of attention from the production to the

fruition of the short story; a story is successful if it affects the reader and, for that reason, Poe

excited emotion, just like Coleridge and Wordsworth before him. He links the unity of effect with

his notion of psychological obsession, which results in an incomplete knowledge of the characters’

nature and the unreliability of the narrator. Poe was also the first one to assert the key role of

endings. As Florence Goyet reminds us, in his Philosophy of Composition (1846) Poe “states that

the whole short story is a kind of preparation for its ending, and insists that the writer should

construct the story with its conclusion constantly in mind”. 5 Indeed, for Poe, this was the most

suitable form to elicit the reader’s entertainment as, being shortest than other fictions, it could be
4
P. Barry, op. cit., p. 217
5
F. Goyet, The Classic Short Story, 1870-1925 – Theory of a Genre, Open Book Publishers, 2014, p. 44
5
read in just one session and, in that case, the reader’s attention would be caught entirely by the

reading of the story since there would be no external forces that would influence the reader’s

enjoyment. On the contrary, longer forms of narrations would require more sessions to its fruition,

and this would cause the attention of the reader to be fragmented, as it would depend by many

factors, such as his mood in that moment.6

Considering these notions, it is now possible to reflect on the nature of the plot twist in the short

story genre. Summing up the features that have been previously highlighted, the twist in the ending

of a short narrative acquires a sort of double importance as it respects both Aristotle and Poe’s

considerations.

For instance, if we take a closer look into the works of the American author, we may notice a

pattern: in his short stories he creates situations that are supposed to be reversed in the moment of

closure, playing with us as far as the reliability of the narrator is concerned. For example, in The

Black Cat we have an alcohol addicted narrator who, since the beginning, informs us that we are not

going to believe his story even if it is true. This element plays an important role in our reading as it

creates doubt in our mind; in fact, at first, we may believe that the narrator’s words are fake due to

his addiction to alcohol, but later we may think the story is not believable because of the paranormal

elements that gradually appear. But it is the final twist that truly surprises us: we know that the

narrator was a violent man who killed his first cat, named Pluto. He then found another cat, which

looked just like Pluto, and adopted it, but with time he grew to despise it. In a moment of anger, the

narrator kills his wife and hides her body inside the wall. From that moment, we don’t see the cat

anymore: the reader is led to believe that the cat, frightened, probably ran away. In the end we

discover that the cat was buried in the wall with the corpse and thanks to its call, the police found it

alongside with the body. The narrator is then sentenced to death because of his cat, which can be

considered a sort of reincarnation of Pluto, the first victim of the man. Ironically, Pluto is the

Roman god of death, so this could be hinted as a sort of anticipation of the narrator’s fate.

6
E. A. Poe, Twice-Told Tales. A Review by Edgar Allan Poe, Graham’s Magazine, May 1842, pp. 298-300.
6
 In this story we may identify two different plot twists: the first one in the middle of the story,

when the narrator finds a cat identical to the deceased Pluto, and the second one in the ending, when

the cat is found inside the wall. The first twist can be considered as such because of the uncanny

resemblance that occur: in fact, Pluto lost an eye, due to a previous aggression by his master, and,

then, also the new cat is without an eye. Later, the feline presents on his fur a white gallows-shaped

blot that terrifies the narrator; this element will be reprised in the ending, when he is sentenced to

death by that same item, after the discovery of the murder. Poe uses all the elements set throughout

the story in an intelligent way; we could also say he respects the use of the anagnorisis and

peripeteia, by condemning the protagonist for his sins. His reversal of fortune is, in fact, due to the

plot twist.

While Poe was one of the most prolific short story writers in the 19 th century, Fredric Brown can

be considered as such in the 20th. Although he may not be seen as Poe’s heir as far as the gothic

genre is concerned - that title belongs undoubtedly to H. P. Lovecraft - Brown is one of the greatest

authors of mystery and science fiction tales. In his short stories, which are often shorter than a page,

he deals with many different themes, from the problems of everyday life to the vastness of the

cosmos; sometimes he finds a way to deal with both of them in just one story.

Nightmare in Yellow, for instance, is a story that conjugates cosmology with something much

more material: murder. The protagonist is a man who, in the eve of his 40 th birthday, plans to run

away and kill his wife, after stealing money from the company he worked for as a lawyer. His

mother believed in cosmology and passed this passion to him. For that reason, he saw the exact

hour of his birth, 8:46 p.m., as the perfect moment to ascend to new life after a miserable one;

therefore, he planned to kill his wife in that specific moment. However, coming back from the

restaurant where the two dined together, they were late and his plan would have not succeeded if he

had waited to get into the house: hence, he killed her in the porch. After taking the corpse in his

arms, he opened the door; suddenly the yellow lights turned on, revealing his friends and family

waiting for him to celebrate his birthday, as his wife had organised a surprise party for her husband.
7
 The twist ending of this story is quite compelling. By giving to the man a deadline within which

he must fulfil his task, Brown creates tension, which is a key element of stories. By having a

determined moment within which something must happen, characters are then forced to make

impulsive decisions before the given deadline. This narration tool is used also in fairy tales: in

Cinderella, for instance, the Fairy Godmother warns the girl that she must come back home before

midnight, otherwise the spell that gave the girl the means to go to the ball would be broken.

Deadlines are often used to accelerate the rhythm of the story, creating anxiety in the reader. In

Brown’s story, the main character’s wife gives him a present and proposes to celebrate his birthday

with a dinner in the restaurant. These facts lead us to believe that, perhaps, she is a loving woman

and does not deserve to die; therefore, we tend to empathise with her rather than with her husband.

Nevertheless, we feel his pressure, because we tend to refer to our common background of everyday

life, a context in which we often have to meet deadlines.

The killing of the woman unleashes the tension felt by readers and by the main character and, in

this context, the plot twist plays an important role: the real celebration, the surprise party, is a

happy moment put unexpectedly after a scene of violence and it leaves us speechless, just like the

ending of Knock. In the last part of both stories there is a strong contraposition between what has

been presented so far and the twist: the violence of a crime and the joy of a party, the loneliness of

the last man on earth and the sudden arrival of another being. The contrast between these opposite

poles, in addition to the elements that have been set throughout the story and then reconsidered in

the ending, results in the effectiveness of the plot twist.

Indeed, we would have never thought that the dinner organised by the man’s wife was an excuse

to leave the house empty, so that their friends could arrange the party for their return. Knowing that,

we would see the dinner in a different in a new reading of the story. In fact, after the revelation of a

plot twist, our perception of the story changes; if, at first, we believed that the man could have got

away with the murder until the very end, in a second reading we know that it would not have been

possible. Nevertheless, this contrast will not prevent us from feeling the same pressure we have
8
previously felt. This feeling is even greater than before due to the fact that the knowledge we got

from the first reading of the story collides with the expectations we get from starting it all over

again, generating, as Florence Goyet calls it, the antithetic tension, a force created by two opposite

poles.7

Conclusions

As we have seen with these two examples, the short story genre is particular apt for an ending

that presents a plot twist, mainly because of the elements highlighted by Poe: its brevity and the fact

that we are raptured by its reading in a single session. Nowadays, twist endings can be found not

only in literature, but in many types of narrations, such as movies, tv series, comic books and

videogames; in those cases, it is expressed differently according to the media in which it is found.

In the last few years, with the rise of transmedia storytelling, stories can be narrated in different

medium: for example, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a media franchise, based on the Marvel

Comics, that sees its stories narrated to the public mainly through the visual medium. In the last

decade, this shared universe started a way of narrating plot twists that has been borrowed by many

other media franchises: the post-credit scene. Sometimes it is just a comic relief, but, frequently, it

is a scene that presents a further development of the story, leaving the audience speechless. It is

actually a new way of narrating a twist ending as it is something that does not belong to the closure

of the movie itself, it is an extra feature that refers to the story that has been presented, but it is not

directly attached to it. This is possible thanks to the development of new forms of narration, which

go along with the development of technology; since, almost daily, new discoveries are made in that

field, it could be interesting to see how the plot twist will evolve in order to fit in.

References

7
F. Goyet, op. cit., p. 47
9
 Barry, Peter, Beginning Theory. An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, Second

Edition, Manchester UP, Manchester and New York, 2009.

 Brown, Fredric, Nightmares and Geezenstacks, Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia,

2015.

 Goyet, Florence, The Classic Short Story, 1870-1925 – Theory of a Genre, Open Book

Publishers, 2014, pp. 43-54. (URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vjtqn.7)

 Poe, Edgar Allan, Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Doubleday &

Company, Inc., Garden City New York, 1966.

 Poe, Edgar Allan, Twice-Told Tales. A Review by Edgar Allan Poe, Graham’s Magazine,

May 1842, pp. 298-300.

 Ryan, Marie-Laurie, “Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative Design”, Narrative, Vol. 17,

No. 1 (Jan. 2009), pp. 56-75.

10