22.6 Story Elements
Because a good story is often ambiguous, supporting multiple interpretations, we will not seek to come to a consensus on what any text means. Rather, we will delight in ambiguity, privileging a range of interpretations, supporting our readings through textual evidence, and shaping them through the application of relevant literary theories. Each particular literary theory offers its own tool set to help us better understand and analyze the literature we read. These theories will be introduced and defined in a later chapter. For now, the most important thing to keep in mind is that stories will be interpreted differently when read and analyzed using the various literary theories. For instance, a feminist reading of a story will arrive at different conclusions than a biographical reading, which sets out to determine how an author’s life circumstances impacted story creation.
This section previews many of the story elements used by writers because those are the terms that we will use for analyzing short fiction. Reading this will not make you an expert, but it is a necessary first step in understanding and using the correct terminology when discussing the assigned stories in this course.
The writers of the stories we will read use many elements of fiction to develop their stories in ways designed to attract and keep readers’ attention. Understanding how these elements work is central to analyzing the stories themselves. However, because authors develop their own style, or method of story-telling, unpacking these elements is often not as easy as it seems. For one thing, authors often build a high degree of ambiguity into their stories, leaving them open to multiple interpretations. For another thing, writing fiction is an art, not a science, and authors take many different artistic approaches to creating their stories, with some relying more heavily on certain story elements than others. As the reader, it is your job to examine the story to determine which story elements the author used and how they work together to drive the plot, or the sequence of events crafted to describe what happens in the story.
The best way to understand the plot of a story is to read it carefully from beginning to end. Mapping a story’s events on a plot line requires that you know the events that make up the story’s action. Unlike novels, which contain long and complicated plots involving many episodes, short stories typically focus on a single brief episode consisting of only a few key events. As you read, be cognizant of a story’s elapsed time, or how much time has passed in the telling of the telling of the narrated events, as well as how the narrator informs you of gaps or omissions in the plot line.
Often story time, or the order of narrated events in a story, differs from chronological order. Authors use time- altering techniques like foreshadowing or flashbacks to disrupt the flow of events within a story. Any information given about events or situations that precede the opening action of a story falls into the story’s exposition, whether it is revealed in the opening paragraphs of the story or well after the story begins. A story’s opening paragraphs may also include an early indication of the plot’s resolution, or its end orientation. By the conclusion of a story, readers realize that the narrator has been using these hints toward the story’s conclusion to condition them to accept the story’s outcome as its most logical conclusion. Often, this realization causes readers to reread the story to discern just how carefully the story builds toward its ending, revealing hints that build suspense without giving away the story’s final outcome.
Stories are inhabited by characters, or the people, animals, and even things (like talking dishes in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast) invented by an author. The process of inventing–and analyzing–characters is called characterization. Characters can be round (well-developed) or flat (showing little character development), major (a key player in the story’s action) or minor (playing a simpler, though important, role in the story’s outcome), complex (possessing a multi- faceted nature) or simple (unchanging or lacking depth), stereotypical (relying on overly generalized characteristics) or out of the ordinary (one of a kind). They may be central to the story or tangential to the main action. Characters might be described, or characterized, in many ways: in terms of their physical appearance, their attitudes, their spoken and unspoken thoughts, and their actions. Authors use direct characterization when they describe a character and indirect characterization when they show how a character acts or behaves.
As you are beginning to understand, authors face a lot of creative choices when crafting their stories. But you need to be careful not to confuse the author, or the person writing the story, with the narrator, the person telling the story. Yes, sometimes there is a character who seems to be an extension of the author, like in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, but more often the author remains distinct from the character in the story who is telling, or narrating, the story. Sometimes, the narrator is someone outside of the story’s action, reporting the characters’ interactions from afar. Other times, the narrator is one of the characters of the story. Sometimes, there are multiple narrators expressing overlapping or competing viewpoints.
The pronouns used by the narrator provide important clues about the type (or types) of narration used within a story. A first-person narrator relies on first person pronouns; these may be singular (I, me, my) or plural (we, us, our, ours), depending on whether the story is being told by a single person or a group of people. A second-person narrator focuses more on directing readers and less on the story teller; this type of narrator employs second person pronouns (you, your, yours) to call on the reader directly. A third-person narrator stands outside the story; third-person narrators use third- person pronouns (he, his, she, hers, it, its, they, their, theirs), speaking from an external viewpoints about the characters. First-person, second-person, and third-person narrators might or might not be the protagonist, or the main character in the story. Narrators can be objective, serving as reliable sources of information, or they may be unreliable, offering inconsistent or inaccurate information when relating the events from their own particular point of view, or perspective, a stance that seems skewed in comparison to how other characters in the story act or think or to what the reader knows about people and how the world works. Narrators can be omniscient, possessing the ability to see into the minds of all the other characters in the story and to discern their thoughts and motives, or they may be limited, or able to see into the minds of only a few key characters. Narrators may also be intrusive, interjecting their ideas and opinions as asides to the reader, apparently hoping to build connections that will convince readers to agree with themor to align themselves along the same lines of thought.
When deciding what type of narration a story employs, it is important to discern between the pronouns used by the narrator and those used by other characters in the story. Just because a character speaks in the first person does not mean that the story has a first-person narrator. To distinguish between narration and dialogue, look for quotation marks that delineate between the a character’s spoken words and the narrator’s recitation of the story. The narrator’s commentary is not typically contained within quotation marks (though this is not a hard and fast rule). Moreover, it is important to watch for narratorial shifts, as some stories shift narrators (and perspectives) in order to depict multiple, often competing viewpoints.
In addition to devising a plot, developing characterization and choosing a narrator, authors also locate their stories in a particular place and time by creating a setting. Early in the story, the narrator will give some indication of the story’s location. This location is both the “where,” or the physical location of the story, and the “when,” its time frame. Settings provide realistic or fantastic backdrops for a story’s events, and they help contribute to its mood and atmosphere, as well as establishing its particular cultural, technological, and social environments.
Settings allow stories to address topics relevant to the time period or socioeconomic conditions. Topics are subjects that the author wishes to address, like slavery or modernization. Statements devised by readers to explain why authors chose to write about certain topics are called themes. Unlike topics, themes are not reducible to a simple word or phrase. Themes are neither plot summaries nor subjects; instead, themes are abstract statements that arise from careful observation about how a story’s individual components (its plot, characterization, narration, setting, etc.) all work together to reveal the author’s motivation for writing the story, or the lesson the author hopes the reader will absorb while reading–without being directly told to do so.
Another key consideration for authors is the genre, or category, into which their stories will fall. The four main genres of literature–poetry, drama, fiction, and non-fiction–have their own individual characteristics. Some classes will focus on fictional texts, specifically the short fictional texts known as short stories. Additionally, there are many sub genres of fiction, including–but not limited to–historical fiction, feminist fiction, metafiction, gothic, American gothic, paranormal/fantasy, science fiction, horror, detective fiction, and bildungsroman (or coming of age fiction). Each story must be read for how it uses and adapts genre conventions, even as you pay careful attention to the story elements already discussed. Stories are highly crafted works of art, with authors exercising intentional design choices for their creations. Every detail has been carefully considered. As readers, your job will be to analyze the result of those choices, noting how the story elements combine to create a coherent whole.
Continue Reading: 22.7 Secrets and Gold
