Novel

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Episodic Plots

Many of the earliest novels had episodic plots. One of the first was Lazarillo de Tormes (1554; Lazaro of Tormes), an anonymous Spanish work that follows the adventures of a rogue. This novel and others with rogues as the main characters are called picaresque novels.

Another Spanish novel with an episodic plot became one of the world’s best-known literary works. Don Quixote (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615) by Miguel de Cervantes follows the travels of a Spanish nobleman who encounters adventures and misfortunes after he strikes out to combat the world’s injustices. Although the novel has a plot, it is structured so that if the reader skips an episode, he or she can still follow Don Quixote’s progress with little loss of understanding.

American writer Mark Twain used an episodic plot in his classic novel Huckleberry Finn (1884), about Huck Finn, a boy who runs away from his hometown and voyages down the Mississippi River on a raft with an escaped slave named Jim. The episodes in Huckleberry Finn revolve around the points when Huck and Jim leave their raft and meet people in the towns and villages that border the river. In between these episodes, they retreat to their raft and contemplate their experiences as they drift south on the water.

A more complicated type of episodic novel is the bildungsroman, a novel about the early years of a person’s life, or a person’s moral or psychological growth. (The term comes from the German for “education novel.”) The bildungsroman traces not adventures but stages of growth in the life of a character. Famous novels of this type include David Copperfield (1849-1850), in which English novelist Charles Dickens traces David’s life from childhood misery to worldly success, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), in which Irish novelist James Joyce records Stephen Dedalus’s emergence as a man and as an artist. Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) by American author Paule Marshall describes the teenage years of Selina Boyce, who grows up in Brooklyn, New York, as the child of immigrants from Barbados. In All the Pretty Horses (1992) by American author Cormac McCarthy, 16-year-old John Grady Cole and two companions travel from Texas to Mexico, where their adventures become rites of passage to manhood.

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Complex Plots

Many novels have more complex plots that follow more than one major character or have more than one major story line. A classic example of a novel with a complex plot is Voina i mir (1865-1869; War and Peace) by Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. This book is concerned with the histories of five families from 1805 to 1814 and with the Russian military campaign against the invading French army led by Napoleon I. The book features aristocrats and peasants, officers and common soldiers, diplomats and courtiers, town life and country life, flirtations, galas, hunting, and harshly realistic scenes of clashing armies.

The subject matter that novels with complex plot can cover is almost limitless. Some novels, like War and Peace, cover all segments of society. Others, such as Pride and Prejudice (1813) by English author Jane Austen, cover narrower subject matter. Austen’s novel is set in roughly the same time period as War and Peace. However, Pride and Prejudice focuses on one upper-class family, the Bennets, and in particular on the Bennet daughters’ search for husbands.

Subject matter continues to vary widely in contemporary novels. One contemporary example of a complex plot is the science-fiction novel Neuromancer (1984) by Canadian author William Gibson. This novel describes a world dominated by technology in which the main characters struggle against a dehumanizing social system. A very different type of novel is The God of Small Things (1997) by Indian author Arundhati Roy. This dreamlike saga set in the Indian state of Kerala chronicles the downfall of a well-to-do family. Despite significant differences in genre and subject matter between these two late-20th-century novels, they both can be classified as complex-plot novels.

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Plots Focusing on Character

Another kind of plot relies more on character than on action. Little action happens, but the subtle quality of the few events and, more crucially, the characters’ feelings about them, form the essence of the story. Madame Bovary (1857) by French novelist Gustave Flaubert, for example, traces Emma Bovary’s problems in three relationships as her marriage degenerates and her two lovers betray her. Everything in the novel arises from the conflict between her romantic ideals about life and the realities of her middle-class existence.

American writer Henry James uses a very simple plot in The Ambassadors (1903), which also focuses on character. Lambert Strether, a middle-aged New Englander, travels to Paris, France, to fetch a young man whose mother is worried about what seems to her to be Europe’s decadent influence. The “ambassador,” Strether, falls under the spell of the city and becomes enchanted with the young man’s mistress. Instead of sending explanations back to the United States, Strether spends his time exploring Europe; the book’s plot focuses on his development as an individual.

The Death of the Heart (1938) by Irish author Elizabeth Bowen concentrates on a young girl’s coming of age and her encounter with the insensitivity of both a lover and her own relatives. The Bone People (1983) by New Zealand writer Keri Hulme looks intensely at the relationship a woman forms with a boy and his adoptive father. The novel’s theme is that the relationships among the three influence each one individually. Although several crucial events occur, the focus remains on the three characters and their interaction.

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4

Experiments with Plots

Some authors experiment with plot by not providing a clearly definable beginning, middle, and end to the story. In Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) by English novelist Laurence Sterne, Tristram himself does not appear until well into the novel. Meanwhile, the reader receives the opinions of the characters Uncle Toby and Mr. Shandy instead. The book also dwells on small details and meditates aloud about itself, as in the narrator’s reflections at the beginning of Chapter 11, Book 2:

In the 20th century writers began to alter the flow of the plot more often. Ulysses (1922) by Irish writer James Joyce is a novel set in Dublin, Ireland, that focuses on the young writer Stephen Dedalus and the married couple Leopold and Molly Bloom. Joyce crowds his plot with details of Dublin life and the random thoughts of his characters. In the end, Joyce leaves several mysteries about his characters unresolved, and he does not tell what happens to the two central heroes, Stephen and Leopold.

American writer William Gaddis experimented with plot in one of his best-known novels, JR (1975), by telling the story of an 11-year-old business mogul solely through dialogue. Playing with the structure of time is another way authors experiment with plot. In Rayuela (1963; Hopscotch, 1966) by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, the preface gives instructions as to the varying orders in which the parts of the novel can be read, offering the reader several different possibilities in terms of plot.

American writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. experimented with time in a different way in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). This novel is about a man who comes “unstuck in time” and moves back and forth to different moments in his life. Dominican-born author Julia Alvarez experimented with time but stayed within the bounds of realism in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991). Alvarez moves her plot backward through time rather than forward. Each successive chapter describes an earlier point in the characters’ lives.

Some novelists blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, as American author Truman Capote did in his novel In Cold Blood (1966), an account of the murder of four family members. Capote termed the book a nonfiction novel. Other writers tell a story from several different points of view, drawing attention to the plot as an element at the whim and mercy of the author. Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier used this approach in El acoso (1956; Manhunt, 1959), about a man trying to escape from his political enemies.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, authors began to experiment with plot by using computers to create so-called hypertext works, which are collections of separate computer files that are linked so that readers can easily jump from one file to another. The reader begins with one file and makes choices about which links to access and read. Hypertext works thus allow the reader to determine the course of the story. With many possible choices at each stage, these works have a great number of potential plot lines. Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, emerged as a center for hypertext writing, in part because Robert Coover, one of the major novelists in the hypertext movement, became a member of Brown’s English department faculty.

B

Characters

The characters of a book are the fictional figures who move through the plot. They are invented by the author and are made of words rather than of flesh and blood. Therefore they cannot be expected to have all the attributes of real human beings. Nevertheless, novelists do try to create fictional people whose situations affect the reader as the situations of real people would.

Authors describe the more simple characters in novels with no more than a few phrases that identify the character’s most important traits. These characters have little capacity for personal growth, and they appear in the novel as limited but necessary elements of the plot. Despite their small parts, such characters are often vivid. The ingratiating, hypocritically “[h]‘umble” Uriah Heep in David Copperfield (1849-1850) by English novelist Charles Dickens is memorable in a way that more complex characters are not. Another simple Dickens character is Mr. Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865), a conformist whose character Dickens captures completely by describing him as someone who will say nothing that would “bring a blush into the cheek of [a] young person.” Although characters such as Heep and Podsnap are severely limited and could not carry a narrative by themselves, they provide a mechanism for the novelist to portray certain ideas or points of view.

A more complex type of character is the mythic figure, who corresponds to an individual from ancient myth or to a shared human experience that is handed down in myths and stories. For example, in the novella The Bear (1942) by American author William Faulkner, the main character, Ike McCaslin, is introduced to his family’s tradition of hunting. His experiences represent the ancient theme of initiation into the hunt, which has been an aspect of human societies for thousands of years. Some modern novelists reinterpret ancient myths and give new attention to characters. In Grendel (1971), American author John Gardner retells the medieval Anglo-Saxon tale Beowulf, in which the hero Beowulf slays the monster Grendel. Gardner’s novel tells the same story, but it is cast from the point of view of the monster. Gardner’s version explores Grendel’s feelings, doubts, and longings.

To create complex, realistic characters, authors usually combine traits that do not correspond to any single real person, but are aspects of several people. To give these characters motives for their actions, authors highlight the characters’ thoughts, feelings, conflicting impulses, and capacity for change. For example, in Anna Karenina (1875-1877) by Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, the main character is torn between her stable yet dull marriage and a passionate yet dangerous affair with a military officer. In the end, Anna suffers a tragic fate as her society denounces her affair and turns its back on her.

Richly textured and detailed characters who are strongly affected by events in their lives, like Anna, exist in works throughout the history of the novel, but they especially flourished in the 19th century. With specific tastes and traits, these characters appear to the reader fully realized as true-to-life individuals. Famous 19th-century literary characters include Emma Woodhouse, the willful, witty, and playful main character in Emma (1816) by English author Jane Austen; Emma Bovary, an extravagant and sensual woman in Madame Bovary (1857) by French novelist Gustave Flaubert; and Dorothea Brooke, who loses her idealism in Middlemarch (1871-1872) by English writer George Eliot.

In the 20th century, experiments with stream of consciousness, a literary technique in which authors represent the flow of sensations and ideas, added to the depth of character portrayal. English novelist Virginia Woolf followed this approach to explore the characters of an Englishwoman and a young former soldier in Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Sometimes stream of consciousness challenges the reader. In To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf achieves a deliberately disorienting effect by moving subtly from character to character, from past to present, and from external events to internal thoughts.

The absence of firmly stamped characters is a feature of the nouveau roman (new novel), a type of novel that developed in France in the 1950s. In the nouveau roman form, characters are only vaguely defined, because the “new novelists” believed that there is no objective truth, only subjective impressions that change depending on viewpoint. An example of a nouveau roman is La jalousie (1957; Jealousy, 1959) by Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Other novelists move in the opposite direction and place true-life people in their works, attempting to portray the people in great detail. For his In Cold Blood (1966), Truman Capote researched the lives of two murderers and wrote their story as a chilling study of personality and motive. Capote’s book traces its ancestry to A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) by English novelist Daniel Defoe, a novel based on real accounts that involves both actual and imagined victims of a real-life plague that occurred in 1665 in London, England.

Novels such as Defoe’s that use historical settings for fictional characters are distinguished from historical novels that attempt to describe the inner lives of historical figures. In Voina i Mir (1865-1869; War and Peace), Russian writer Leo Tolstoy not only grounds his story firmly in the era of the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), but also portrays French emperor Napoleon I directly, placing the reader in Napoleon’s mind by describing the emperor’s thoughts about the glory of Moscow as he stands before the city.

Some novelists use historical figures not as main characters but as elements of a backdrop to a fictional story. American writer E. L. Doctorow takes this approach in Ragtime (1975), a book about three families in early-20th-century America. The novel features appearances by public figures such as magician Harry Houdini and businessman J. P. Morgan.

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