Lesson 1.3 · Unit 1 · Short Fiction I · STR 3.A, 3.B
Plot: how events are ordered
Plot is not the list of events. Plot is the order a writer puts them in, and the order is where the meaning lives.
Two questions do the work: what happened, and when did the reader find out? Where the sequences differ, something was withheld, and a withholding is arguable.
- STR-1.A. Plot is the sequence of events in a narrative; events throughout a narrative are connected, with each event building on the others, often with a cause-and- effect relationship.
- STR-1.C. Plot and the exposition that accompanies it focus readers' attention on the parts of the narrative that matter most to its development, including characters, their relationships, and their roles in the narrative, as well as setting and the relationship between characters and setting.
- STR-1.X. Some narrative structures interrupt the chronology of a plot; such structures include flashback, foreshadowing, in medias res, and stream of consciousness.
- STR-1.AA. Pacing is the manipulation of time in a text. Several factors contribute to the pace of a narrative, including arrangement of details, frequency of events, narrative structures, syntax, the tempo or speed at which events occur, or shifts in tense and chronology in the narrative.
- Order of telling (STR 3.A): the sequence in which a text releases events, which need not match the order they happened in.
- Exposition (STR 3.A): a function, not a location: whatever a reader must know before the conflict can mean anything.
- Climax (STR 3.B): the moment tension turns into change. Find it by what changes, not by what is loudest.
- Withheld information (STR 3.B): a delay the writer chooses. Ask what the reader assumes during the gap, and what the gap costs a character.
- Pacing (STR 3.B): how much text an event is given. A paragraph spent on a chair outweighs a sentence spent on a death.
About the text: Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour,” first published 1894. The opening four paragraphs, complete and unbroken.
Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death.
It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband's friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard's name leading the list of “killed.” He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.
She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.
There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.
Chopin orders the opening so that grief arrives as a public procedure and only then as a private fact. Two full paragraphs go to the machinery of delivery, “great care was taken to break to her,” Richards confirming the report “by a second telegram”, while Mrs. Mallard's own response is compressed into a single clause, “She wept at once.” The proportion is the argument: the early words go to other people deciding what she can bear. Only once she is alone does the pace slow enough for a chair and a window to get a paragraph of their own: Chopin's way of saying the real event has not begun.
Exam tip: a structure question wants an order and a consequence; what we learn, when we learn it, and what the timing does to us.
Plot is the sequence of events, and the events are connected, each building on the others, often by cause and effect: in Chopin's opening, the news of a death causes the careful telling, which causes the retreat to the room, which causes the hour at the window. Some narrative structures interrupt the chronology of a plot. A flashback jumps back to an earlier event; foreshadowing hints at what comes later (Chopin's first sentence, with its “heart trouble,” is foreshadowing); in medias res begins in the middle of the action, as the Iliad opens in the tenth year of the war; and stream of consciousness (Lesson 3.5) follows a mind rather than a calendar. Such structures can directly affect a reader's experience by creating anticipation or suspense or building tension.
Write one paragraph arguing what Chopin gains by telling how the news was delivered before how Mrs. Mallard received it. Quote two phrases of eight words or fewer.
Show a model response
By putting the delivery before the reaction, Chopin makes the reader spend the opening with the people managing Mrs. Mallard rather than with Mrs. Mallard. The first paragraph is about how “great care was taken” to tell her; the second is about Richards verifying the death “by a second telegram.” Both are busy with other people's judgment of what she can survive. Her own grief then gets one clause before she goes upstairs, and the door closes behind her. The order makes her inner life look like something she has to leave the room to reach.
Rubric: the claim concerns sequence, not events (Row A); each quotation is followed by commentary on what the ordering does to the reader (Row B).