Plot and Causation: Related Events

Abstract

The problems begin with the definitions. Let us set aside the secret plan, though an author’s scheming about a story may have some resemblance to conspiratorial thinking. Plot is a sequence of narrated events. Or, plot is a set of events related by causation. Plot is a kind of story, such as the marriage plot, whose evocation may or may not actually govern the shape of the story— Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot (2011) illustrates this possibility. Plot is the story in the way the narrator tells it (in the text’s discourse). Or, plot is what the reader understands as the real story, having deciphered the narrator’s telling and gotten at the underlying events. Discussions of plot can emphasize narrative’s complicated relations with time (chronology), order (and disorder), and generic conventions. (Each of these elements is treated in its own chapter, following this one.) Plot’s deep structures have been studied by structuralist theorists interested in the ‘grammar’ of narrative. Aspects of plot, including episodes, digressions, multiple plots, and closure, have in themselves attracted a great deal of critical attention. An influential school of thought in feminist criticism sees some women writers as working against plot or traditional plot devices. Along with a narrator (one who tells) and characters (those existents or figures who embody actions and thoughts), plot is a core feature of narrative fiction. Not everyone has been happy about this fact.