Plot Climax

Sometimes, in fact very often, beginners cannot easily draw the distinction between story
and plot, or they merely confuse these two aspects of fiction. On the following pages we’ll
attempt to distinguish between them in very simple terms.

STORY versus PLOT

Story is the chronological sequence of events. Plot is the logical and causal structure of a
story. The American author and critic E. M. Forster suggested to distinguish between story
and plot by juxtaposing them with each other. “We can define story”, he writes, “as a
narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the
emphasis falling on causality”.

What Foster precisely means in his remark can easily be illustrated with the following –
when we, for instance, say: “The king died, and then the queen died”, it’s a story but when
we say: “The king died and then the queen died of a grief”, it’s already a plot. To put it all in a
nut-shell, if the information about the Queen’s death answers the question “And then?”- it is
rendered in a story, and if it answers the question “Why?” – it’s rendered in a plot. That is
the fundamental difference between these two aspects of fiction. The time- sequence in the
plot is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. We can go the other way round
and say: “The Queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through
grief at the death of the king”. This narrative suggests the similar plot, but with a mystery in
it, a form capable of high development.

In the example above, the moment that grief is established as the motive for the death of the
Queen, two merely coincidental events become linked together as cause effect.
Consequently, what once was just a story – a direct, unedited rendering of facts – has been
rearranged and translated into a potentially interesting and exciting plot.

Thus, the term plot implies the controlling intelligence of an author, who has a mass of raw
facts and incidents at his disposal and arranges them suggesting their causal relationship.
William Shakespeare, for instance, scarcely ever invented stories – he simply took the
existing ones and rearranged them into wonderful plots, thus creating masterpieces of drama.

The Elements of plot

When we refer to the plot of a work of fiction, we are referring to the deliberately arranged
sequence of interrelated events that constitute the basic narrative structure of a novel or a
short story. Events of any kind, of course, inevitably involve people, and for this reason it is
virtually impossible to discuss plot in isolation from character. Character and plot are, in fact,
intimately and reciprocally related, especially in modern fiction. Generally speaking, a
literary character is nothing but the determination of incident, and the incident is nothing
but the illustration of character. Consequently, the major function of plot can be defined as
the representation of characters in action which, in its turn, can be internal and
psychological as well as external and physical.

In order for a plot to begin, some kind of catalyst is necessary. It will generate a sequence of
events, provide direction to the plot, and focus the reader’s attention. Most plots originate in
some significant conflict. The conflict may be either external, when the protagonist (also
referred to as the hero or the focal character) is pitted against some object outside himself, or
internal, when the issue to be resolved is the one within the protagonist’s psyche or
personality. External conflict may reflect a basic opposition between man and nature (such as
in Ernest Hemingway’s “the Old Man and the sea”). It may also take a form of an opposition
between man and man (between protagonist and the antagonist – his human adversary), as
for example in most detective fiction. Internal conflict, on the other hand, is confined to the
protagonist. In this case, the opposition is between two or more elements with – in his own
character.

Most plots, it should be noted, contain more than one conflict. It should be noted as well that
the conflict of a story may exist prior to the formal initiation of the plot itself. Some conflicts,
in fact, are never made explicit and must be inferred by the reader from what the characters
say or do as the unfolds (as in most part of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories). Conflict, then,
is the basic opposition, or tension, that sets the plot of a novel or short story in motion; it
engages the reader, builds the suspense or mystery of the work, and arouses expectation for
the events that are to follow.
The plot of the traditional short story is often built on five distinct stages or elements, that
can be diagramed as follows:

3.crisis

4. falling action
2. complication 5. resolution
(denouement)
1. exposition

beginning middle end

In some novels this five-stage structure is repeated in many of the individual chapters.

EXPOSITION: A work of fiction, as a rule, describes some significant events or several- year
–long periods of the character’s lives; it hardly ever starts “at the very beginning”, i.e. with
the moment they are born. Thus, the reader always need some preliminary background
information, which will help them to easily “penetrate” into the characters’ problems at
some particular stage of their lives. This preliminary information is generally provided in the
beginning section of the plot, viz. exposition. The exposition sets the scene, dates the action,
establishes situation, or merely moulds the profitable mood in the reader. It may also
introduce character and the conflict, or the potential for the conflict. The exposition may be
accomplished in a single sentence or paragraph, or, in the case of some novel, occupy an
entire chapter or more. Some plots require more exposition than others.

COMPLICATION: The complication (which is sometimes referred to as the rising action)

breacs the existing equilibrium and introduces the characters and the the conflict (if they
have not already been introduced by the exposition). It also activates the conflict through
some events or details that help to develop it gradually and intensely.

CRISIS: The crisis (also referred to as the climax) is that moment at which the plot reaches its
point of the greatest emotional intensity; it is the turning point of the plot, directly
precipitating its resolution.

RESOLUTION: The final section of the plot is its resolution; it records the outcome of the
conflict and establishes some new equilibrium or stability. The resolution is also referred to
as the conclusion or denouement, the latter is a French word meaning “unknotting” or
“untying”.
Highly plotted works, such as detective novels and stories, which contain distinct
beginnings, middles, and ends, usually follow such conventional plot development. In the
case of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, for example, the exposition is usually
presented by the faithful Dr. Watson:

“One summer night, a few months after my marriage, I was seated by my own hearth
smoking a last pipe and nodding over a novel, for my day’s work the work had been an
exhausting one. My wife had already gone upstairs and the sound of the locking of the door
some time before told me that the servants had also retired… I suddenly heard the clang of
the bell… I opened the door. To my astonishment, it was Sherlock Holmes who stood upon
my step.

‘Ah, Watson’, said he, ‘I hoped that I might not be too late to catch you”.

From “The Crooked Man” (1893)

The complication comes about almost at once. The crime is reported, and with Holmes’s
famous “come, Watson, the game is afoot” the period of rising action and suspense begins.
Holmes, of course, is the hero-protagonist, the villain is the antagonist. For a time at least,
the conflict or will and intellect seem almost even. Once Holmes solves mystery, the crisis
has been reached. The suspense and tension drop away, and the plot enters into the falling
action, which is developed to Holmes’s detained explanation of his method of detection. The
resolution is short and belongs either to Watson or to Holmes:

“And that’s the story of the Musgrave Ritual, Watson. They have the crown down at
Hurlstone – though they had some legal brother, and a considerable sum to pay before they
were allowed to retain…of the woman nothing was ever heard, and the probability is that
she got away out of England…”

From “The Musgrave Ritual” (1893)

It should be noted, that all plots do not lend themselves to such neat and exact formulations.
Even when they do, it is not unusual for critics and readers to disagree about, for example,
where the major crisis, or turning point, of the narrative actually occurs (as far as it can, in
fact, occur at any moment- at the beginning, near the middle or even at the very end of the
story). Besides, as it generally happens in the most of James Joyce’s “Dubliners”, any of the
plot elements (excluding climax!) can be omitted in favor of the plot. In much modern and
contemporary fiction the plot consists of a “slice of life” into which we enter on the eve of
crisis, and the readers are left to guess the beginning and the end and the precise nature of
the conflict from what they are able to learn. This is the case in such famous Hemingway’s
short stories as “Hills Like White Elephants” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”, in which
the author chooses to eliminate not only the traditional beginning, but also the ending in
order to focus our attention on a more limited moment of time, the middle, which takes the
form of a single, self-contained episode. Conflict and complication in each case are neither
shown nor prepared for, but only revealed; the situation and the “story” are to be understood
and completed through the active participation of the reader. Such stories are sometimes
referred to as “plotless” in order to suggest that the author’s emphasis and interests have been
shifted elsewhere, most frequently to character or idea.

From what has been said above, we can conclude, that highly plotted works, developed
through the “happenings” (or events), mostly contain all the plot elements (in other words,
they have the closed plot structure), whereas the plotless ones (with the emphasis on the
character’s psychics or some idea) lack some or the most of the plot elements (in other words,
they have the open plot structure).

Understanding the plot on a schematic level becomes even more difficult when dealing with
bigger works, usually novels, that have more than one plot. Many of them contain several
subplots, and some even develop a double plot, as in Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” where we are
asked to follow the careers of two ladies – Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley.

climax

rising action falling action

explosition denouement
Inciting incident resolution

The diagram above is called Freytag’s Pyramid

Gustav Freytag was a Nineteenth Century German novelist who saw common patterns in the
plots of stories and novels and developed a diagram to analyze them.
Narrative discourse does not have to present the story in chronological order. A narrative
may begin with action and then execute a flashback.