ENG140Y1/Unit 5

Unit 5 · Literature for our Time

Prose II: Structure & Character

The order events are told in is separate from the order they happened in, and the gap between them is a choice. So is every method by which a character becomes someone the reader thinks they know.

By the end you can

• Separate story from plot and say what the arrangement achieves.
• Analyse openings, endings and chapter divisions.
• Identify how a character is constructed.
• Read a gap or an omission as evidence.

Why it matters & where it comes from

Why it exists

A novel could tell its events in order and rarely does. Beginning at the end, withholding a scene, cutting between two timelines — each controls what the reader knows when, and suspense, irony and revelation all depend on it.

In the real world

Any account of events chooses an order and an entry point. A legal argument, a news story and a job interview all arrange the same facts to different effect.

Story & open questions

The Russian Formalists distinguished fabula from syuzhet — raw events from their arrangement — around 1920, and the distinction has organised narrative theory ever since.

Story and plot

Definition

Story: the events in the order they happened.

Plot: the order the text presents them in.

A detective novel's story begins with the murder. Its plot begins with the body being found — and the entire genre lives in that rearrangement.

Rule What arrangement does

Analepsis — flashback. Supplies information the reader now needs, and reframes what came before.

Prolepsis — flashforward. Removes suspense about what happens and shifts attention to how.

Ellipsis — a gap. Something is skipped, and the skipping is itself meaningful.

Pace. Twenty years in a sentence, or one afternoon over forty pages. What gets slowed down is what the novel considers important.

Example Reading an ellipsis

A novel covers a character's life in detail and then jumps five years, resuming after a death that is never shown.

The omission is not laziness. Something has been withheld, and the reader feels the shape of the missing part.

Possible arguments: the event is unnarratable for the focaliser; showing it would resolve something the novel wants left open; the gap enacts the character's own refusal to revisit it.

Any of these can be argued from what surrounds the gap. What cannot be argued is that nothing is happening there.

Openings and endings

Rule Openings do several jobs at once

A first page establishes voice, sets the terms of the world, and creates the question that keeps the reader going. It is also, unlike the middle, a passage the author has certainly rewritten many times.

Ask what the opening withholds, not only what it supplies. A novel that begins without naming its narrator has chosen that.

Ask what its first sentence's syntax announces about the voice.

Rule Endings answer or refuse

Closed: the questions are answered and the situation settled.

Open: deliberately unresolved, which throws interpretive work back to the reader.

Modern and contemporary fiction — the period this course covers — often prefers the open ending, and the refusal is part of the argument rather than a failure to finish.

Example Comparing first and last

A reliable essay move: put the opening and closing passages side by side.

What has changed in the voice? Has the syntax loosened or tightened, the vocabulary shifted?

Does an image from the opening return, and altered how?

A novel that begins and ends in the same place, with the same words, is saying something about circularity that a paraphrase of the plot would miss entirely.

Character

Rule Character is constructed, not described

Readers assemble a person from evidence. The methods:

Direct statement. The narration says what they are like. Efficient, and worth distrusting — especially in first person.

Action. What they do under pressure. Usually the most reliable.

Speech. Vocabulary, rhythm, what they avoid saying.

Others' reactions. How the world treats them.

Contrast. A foil whose difference defines them both.

Write about construction, not psychology

"She is insecure" is a claim about a person who does not exist. "The novel constructs her insecurity through the gap between her confident speech and the hesitations in her narration" is a claim about a text, and it can be evidenced. Keep the analysis on the page.

Example Speech as construction

A character who never finishes a sentence in company and speaks fluently when alone.

The pattern is the evidence, and it is countable — you can point at every instance.

The argument is what the novel does with the pattern: whether it invites sympathy, marks a social position, or sets up a later scene where the fluency appears in company.

Note this never requires guessing what the character "feels". The text's method is the subject.

Definition

Flat characters are built on a single trait and do not change. Not a defect — they let a novel populate a world without diluting attention.

Round characters carry contradiction and can surprise the reader convincingly.

Asking which characters get roundness, and which are denied it, is often more productive than analysing the protagonist.

Common pitfalls

• Retelling the plot instead of analysing its arrangement.
• Treating characters as real people with psychologies to diagnose.
• Ignoring gaps. An omission is evidence.
• Assuming an open ending is a weakness.
• Analysing only the protagonist. The minor characters show what the novel finds worth developing.

Practice

Work each fully before opening the answer. These use invented scenarios so the method is visible without depending on a set text.

Practice 1 · Story or plot

A novel opens with a funeral, then goes back a year. Which order is which?

Answer

The story begins a year earlier; the plot begins at the funeral. The rearrangement means the reader reads the year knowing how it ends.

Practice 2 · The effect

What does that arrangement do?

Answer

Removes suspense about the outcome and replaces it with dramatic irony — every hopeful moment is read against a known ending. Attention shifts from what happens to how it became inevitable.

Practice 3 · Pace

A chapter gives one dinner forty pages and the following decade two paragraphs. What follows?

Answer

The dinner is where the novel's real subject lies. Pace is a statement of priority, and the compression of the decade says the years changed less than the evening.

Practice 4 · Diagnose

What is wrong with "the protagonist is selfish because of her upbringing"?

Answer

It psychologises a construct. Rewrite as a claim about method: how does the novel build the selfishness, and what does it place beside her upbringing to invite that connection?

Practice 5 · A gap

A novel never shows the central argument between two characters. What might you argue?

Solution

That the withholding preserves both accounts as equally possible, so the reader cannot adjudicate. Or that the focaliser cannot bear to revisit it. Argue from what surrounds the gap — how each character refers to it afterwards.

Practice 6 · Flat characters

Why might a novel keep a character flat deliberately?

Answer

To populate the world without dividing attention, to make a social type visible, or — pointedly — to show a narrator who cannot see certain people as fully human. The last is the most interesting to argue.

Practice 7 · First and last

What should you compare when analysing an ending?

Answer

The opening. Changes in voice, returning images and whether the closing situation answers the opening question are all evidence, and the comparison is easy to make.

Practice 8 · Open ending

How do you write about an ending that resolves nothing?

Answer

Ask what the refusal achieves. Perhaps the novel's subject is a situation with no resolution available, and closing it would falsify that. The absence of an answer is the answer, and you argue for which one.

Expanded topic checklist

Course coverage. This unit is part of the complete ENG140Y1 topic map. It should cover the following before you move on:

• Story and plot. The distinction, and the devices that separate them.
• Openings and endings. What each establishes, and comparing them.
• Character construction. The five methods, and keeping claims textual.
• Flat and round. Who is granted development, and what that implies.

Textbook/source alignment

The calendar names prose as one of three genres. Check Quercus for the novels set and the essay topics, which in first-year courses often ask directly about structure or characterisation.

Core idea map

Events happen in one order and are told in another; the difference is evidence. Characters are assembled from textual signals; the assembly is what you analyse. Unit 6 moves to texts written to be performed.

Study routine. While reading, mark every place the timeline jumps and every scene that is skipped. The pattern of what a novel refuses to show is often its clearest statement.

Deep practice extensions

Use these after the main practice set. They test whether the distinctions have actually landed.

Extension 1 · The distinction

Define story against plot.

Guide

Story is the events in chronological order; plot is the order the text presents them.

Extension 2 · Pace

What does slowing down indicate?

Guide

Importance. What a novel dwells on is what it considers its subject.

Extension 3 · Character claims

How should a claim about a character be phrased?

Guide

As a claim about construction — how the text builds the impression — rather than about a psychology.

Extension 4 · Omission

Is a missing scene evidence?

Guide

Yes. Ellipsis is a choice, and what surrounds the gap supports arguments about why it is there.

← Unit 04Prose I: narration & point of view Unit 06 →Drama