Lesson 1.9 · Unit 1 · RL.9-10.5
Order, pacing, flashback and frame
A writer chooses not only what to tell but when to tell it, and the standards for this band ask specifically about how those choices create mystery, tension or surprise. This lesson is about the difference between the story and the telling.
- Chronology is the order events occurred; structure is the order they are told, and a writer may separate the two freely.
- A flashback interrupts the present to show something earlier; foreshadowing plants something now that pays off later.
- In medias res begins in the middle of the action and fills in the beginning afterward.
- A frame narrative is a story inside another story, which raises the question of who is telling the inner one and why.
- Pacing is how much text is given to how much time, so a page covering ten years moves fast and a page covering ten seconds moves slowly.
- Slowing the pace signals importance, because a writer who gives four paragraphs to a moment is telling you to attend.
- Parallel plots run two lines of action that comment on each other, and the comparison is usually the point.
- Withholding creates mystery; revealing creates dramatic irony, which is why the same information placed differently produces opposite effects.
Where students lose marks: retelling the plot in order when asked about structure. The question is about the arrangement, so the answer must name a choice the writer made and the effect it produced.
The texts. Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado", 1846, and Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game", 1924. Both public domain.
For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace requiescat!
"Off there to the right somewhere is a large island," said Whitney. "It's rather a mystery."
"What island is it?" Rainsford asked.
"The old charts call it 'Ship-Trap Island,'" Whitney replied. "A suggestive name, isn't it? Sailors have a curious dread of the place."
Step one: establish the timeline of Poe's story. The events occupy one night during carnival. The telling occurs fifty years later. Chronology and structure are separated by half a century, and we learn that only in the last sentence.
Step two: work out what the delay accomplishes. For the whole story we read the account as though it were recent. The final line reveals that the narrator has carried this for fifty years and is only now telling someone, which retroactively changes the entire text from a report into a confession.
Step three: connect it to the opening. "You, who so well know the nature of my soul" now reads differently, because the listener has known him for fifty years and is hearing this for the first time. The structure has made the first sentence and the last sentence work together across the whole story.
Step four: name the technique. Withholding. Poe possesses this information from the first word and releases it last, which converts what looked like an ending into a reframing. Placed at the start it would have produced a different story entirely, more elegiac and less unsettling.
Step five: turn to Connell and identify the foreshadowing. Ship-Trap Island, a curious dread among sailors, "rather a mystery". The story plants its danger in the first exchange, before any character is in any danger at all.
Step six: state what foreshadowing does to pace. It licenses the writer to take time. Because the reader already expects something on that island, Connell can spend several pages on a conversation about hunting without the story feeling slow, since every line is read as leading somewhere.
Step seven: examine the pacing shift. The opening conversation covers perhaps twenty minutes in several pages. The fall from the yacht and the swim occupy a few paragraphs for a much longer period. Then the hunt itself slows drastically again. The text expands where the danger is and compresses where it is not.
Step eight: state the general principle. Ask two questions of any structure: what did the writer tell out of order, and where did the text expand or contract relative to clock time. Answering both names the choices, and the effect follows from the choices rather than from the events themselves.
Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.
- Distinguish chronology from structure.
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Chronology is the order events occurred; structure is the order they are told
- Distinguish flashback from foreshadowing.
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A flashback shows something earlier; foreshadowing plants something now that pays off later
- What is in medias res?
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Beginning in the middle of the action and filling in the beginning afterward
- Define pacing.
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How much text is given to how much elapsed time
- What is a frame narrative?
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A story told inside another story
- Explain what Poe's final line does to the whole story.
Show the full solution
Until that sentence the reader has taken the account as recent. "For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them" reveals that the narrator has carried this for fifty years and is only now telling anyone, which retroactively converts the text from a report into a confession. Everything read as cool narration becomes something carried in silence for decades, and the change happens in the last eleven words. It converts a report into a fifty-year-old confession, retroactively
- How does the final line change the first?
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"You, who so well know the nature of my soul" now means a listener who has known Montresor for fifty years and is hearing this for the first time. The intimacy of the address becomes disturbing rather than merely rhetorical, since it implies a long relationship conducted while this was concealed. The structure makes the opening and closing sentences work together across the entire story. The listener has known him for fifty years without knowing this
- Why does foreshadowing let a writer slow the pace?
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Because the reader already expects something and therefore reads every intervening line as leading toward it. Connell plants Ship-Trap Island and the sailors' dread in the first exchange, which licenses him to spend several pages on a conversation about hunting philosophy. Without the plant that conversation would feel like delay; with it, the same pages feel like approach, and the reader supplies the tension the text is not yet producing. Expectation makes intervening pages read as approach rather than delay
- Describe the pacing pattern in "The Most Dangerous Game".
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The opening conversation covers perhaps twenty minutes across several pages, which is slow. The fall from the yacht and the long swim to shore occupy a few paragraphs for a much longer stretch of time, which is fast. The hunt then slows drastically again, with small movements taking substantial text. The text expands where the danger is and compresses where it is not, which is the standard relationship between pacing and importance. Slow, then compressed through the swim, then very slow through the hunt
- State the two questions to ask of any structure.
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What did the writer tell out of order, and where does the text expand or contract relative to clock time. The first identifies flashback, foreshadowing, withholding and framing; the second identifies pacing and therefore what the writer considers important. Answering both names the choices the writer made, and the effects on the reader follow from those choices rather than from the events, which is what a question about structure is asking for. What was told out of order, and where the text expands or contracts against clock time