III.

Elements of the Novel

To create a fictional world that seems real to the reader, novelists use five main elements: plot, characters, conflict, setting, and theme.

The plot is the novel’s story and its underlying meaning. Therefore, when a reader describes the plot of a novel, the reader should describe both what happens to the characters and the meaning of these events. Plots can be anything the writer dreams up, from narratives so realistic that they seem like nonfiction to tales of the fantastic, such as science-fiction works that involve distant worlds.

To engage the reader, a novel must feature characters with complex and complete personalities. Characters do not need to be physically realistic; science-fiction novels often feature aliens as characters. But meaningful characters usually have hopes, fears, concerns, and ambitions that the reader can recognize. Well-conceived characters do not simply serve as devices to further the plot; they convince the reader that they have lives beyond the boundaries of the particular story being told.

The novelist makes the reader care about the story by introducing some sort of conflict. The conflict can be physical, emotional, or ethical, but it always creates some sort of tension that the characters must resolve.

Another element that the novelist uses to draw in the reader is the setting of the work—the time and place that the story occurs. For some novelists, setting is essential and plays a major role in the book’s theme, as in a novel that is about life in the American South. For other authors, the setting is not as important—for example, in a book that focuses on the inner thoughts of a single character.

The theme of a novel is the major idea that the novelist is setting forth in writing the book. The theme gives the novel greater depth than it would have if it were a simple recitation of a series of actions. An author uses the other elements of the novel to build the work’s theme. For example, to develop a theme about the current state of the American South, an author might set the book in the South, feature characters from the South, and have the characters speak in a Southern style. Through these elements, along with the plot, the novelist conveys the novel’s theme.

A.

Plot

The plot of a novel is the narrative and thematic development of the story—that is, what happens and what these events mean. English novelist E. M. Forster, author of works such as A Room with a View (1908) and Howards End (1910), referred to the plot as a “narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality.” By this statement he meant that plot is a series of events that depend on one another, not a sequence of unrelated episodes.

There are several types of plots. An episodic plot features distinct episodes that are related to one another but that can also be read individually, almost as stories by themselves. Most novels involve more complex plots, in which the story builds on itself so that each episode evolves out of a previous one and produces another one. Some plots are based less on the physical action of events than on the emotional reactions of characters and their efforts to communicate their feelings to others. And some novelists experiment with plot, interrupting the main story with subplots, moving back and forth in time, or merging fact with fiction.

A.1.

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.

A.2.

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.

A.3.

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.

A.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.

C.

Conflict

The plot of a novel unfolds as the novel’s characters deal with conflict. The conflict may be of various types. It may be physical, as in Red Badge of Courage (1895) by American author Stephen Crane, in which a young man goes to battle during the American Civil War (1861-1865). The conflict may be ethical and involve making decisions that affect other people. In All the King’s Men (1946), American novelist Robert Penn Warren depicts this kind of conflict by focusing on the effect an ambitious Southern politician named Willie Stark has upon his assistant, Jack Burden, and others. The conflict in a novel may also be emotional. A Death in the Family (1957) by American writer James Agee is about a family recovering from the death of a loved one.

Many conflicts in novels occur between two characters. For example, Les misérables (1862) by French novelist Victor Hugo is about an obsessive policeman named Javert who pursues the character Valjean. Intruder in the Dust (1948) by American novelist William Faulkner features a different sort of conflict, between a small group of characters and the rest of local society. In the book, which is set in the American South, a black man, Lucas Beauchamp, is accused of murder. A white boy, his black friend, and an elderly woman help Beauchamp prove his innocence.

Don Quixote (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615) by Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes describes conflict between an individual and society. The novel is the comic story of a nobleman who continually misinterprets his encounters with other people and thus has a unique view of his society. Conflict in novels can also occur between social groups, as in Germinal (1885) by French novelist Émil Zola, a work about a group of miners who try to better their lot in life.

Conflict can also occur within a character’s own mind, as that character struggles internally. La chute (1956; The Fall, 1957) by French writer Albert Camus is about a lawyer who lives without questioning his actions until a moment of personal revelation sets him forever to doubting himself. Another novel that features a character with inner turmoil is The Moviegoer (1961) by American author Walker Percy. The novel’s main character, Binx Bolling, is a stockbroker searching for meaning in his life.

Most novelists draw the reader in by having the novel’s conflict develop over time. The reader sees the situation that provokes the conflict, the development of the conflict from episode to episode, and then the climax and the resolution of the conflict. As the tension builds toward the main conflict, the author may introduce subplots that create and resolve other points of conflict. Some novelists reverse the reader’s expectations by describing the aftermath of the story, then going back in time to reveal how the characters arrived at that point.

D.

Setting

The setting of a novel—the time and place of its action—is crucial to the creation of a complete work. Physical places such as deserts and outer space, as well as cultural settings such as hospitals and universities, help determine characters’ conflicts, aspirations, and destinies.

In the 19th century, writers such as Honoré de Balzac of France, Ivan Turgenev of Russia, and Charles Dickens of England provided great amounts of detail when describing their novels’ settings, and they did so for specific reasons. In Balzac’s Père Goriot (1834; Old Goriot), the main character arrives in Paris and finds lodging at a boarding house, the Maison Vauquer. The house’s shabby furniture and stained linens represent the struggles of lower-middle-class life. In Ottsy i deti (1862; Fathers and Sons), Turgenev distinguishes between two kinds of country families by contrasting the elegance and the earthiness of their respective households. The ominousness of Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860-1861) proceeds as much from the bleak marshes and the Gothic house owned by the character Miss Havisham as from anything the characters say or do.

Some novelists pay less attention to specific physical objects. English writer Jane Austen, for example, is less concerned with items in a room than Dickens is, but this does not mean she is not concerned with social environment. In focusing, rather precisely, on details such as Mr. Bennet’s income in Pride and Prejudice (1813) or Mr. Eliot’s background in Persuasion (1818), she creates an atmosphere in which a character’s background and home town—whether London, the town of Meryton, or somewhere in northern England—becomes central to the story.

Sometimes novelists make time and place so essential to the narrative that they become as important as the characters themselves. Often this occurs when novels are set in a single, distinctive location. For example, Wuthering Heights (1847) by English novelist Emily Brontë, The Scarlet Letter (1850) by American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) by English novelist Thomas Hardy are inconceivable without their settings of Stonehenge, colonial New England, and the Yorkshire moors, respectively.

American author William Faulkner set The Sound and the Fury (1929), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and many other works in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. Characters featured in one book also show up as characters in other works, drawing all the works together as what is called the Yoknapatawpha saga.

The novel Jazz (1992) by American author Toni Morrison is set in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance. This cultural movement of the 1920s and early 1930s featured innovations in literature, theater, art, and music. The setting Morrison creates is integral to the book, whose narrative voice echoes the loose, unpredictable rhythms of the jazz music of the time.

E.

Theme

A novel’s theme is the main idea that the writer expresses. Theme can also be defined as the underlying meaning of the story.

The theme of a novel is more than its subject matter, because an author’s technique can play as strong a role in developing a theme as the actions of the characters do. For example, American novelist Wright Morris explores the interaction of the past and present in his work The Field of Vision (1956), which is set at a bullfight in Mexico. Morris’s technique is to use the bullfight’s action as a trigger that causes each of the five characters, all American spectators, to remember events from the past.

Rarely can a novel’s theme be interpreted in only one way. Because of the length of novels, and the various characters, conflicts, and scenes found within them, readers can look at different aspects of the work to uncover different interpretations of the meaning of the tale. British novelist Lawrence Durrell demonstrated this in his series of novels The Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960), which is intended to be experienced not as a series of individual novels but as a single work. The collection looks at life in Alexandria, Egypt, before and during World War II (1939-1945). In the four books, Durrell offers different perspectives on roughly the same actions.

A common theme in novels is the conflict between appearance and reality. For example, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) by American writer Carson McCullers concerns John Singer, a man who cannot speak or hear. Nevertheless, he serves as a sort of confessor to a group of neighbors. These people idealize him as a listener—“Each man described the mute as they wished him to be”—and unburden themselves by speaking to him. However, the reality is that Singer cannot understand the people and that they do not understand him; they are bewildered when he commits suicide.

Another common theme is the search for personal identity. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by American writer J. D. Salinger convincingly depicts Holden Caulfield, a teenager who realizes that he is no longer a child, but who is not quite ready for adulthood. Holden’s desperate search for identity has captured the imagination of generations of adolescent readers.

The theme of an individual who strikes out alone to face the world is used in many works. One of the most famous instances is in Huckleberry Finn (1884) by American novelist Mark Twain. The book, set before the American Civil War (1861-1865), is about a boy, Huck, who cannot endure the restrictions of his life in a town along the Mississippi River. He runs away and rafts down the river, along the way becoming friends with an escaped slave named Jim.

Some novels feature people who cannot break from their society’s conventions and instead become disillusioned with the conflict between their aspirations and the reality of their lives. American novelist John Updike explored this theme in Rabbit, Run (1960), about a former high school basketball star who is disappointed with his marriage, unsettled by the birth of his first child, and unhappy with his job as a used-car salesman.

Throughout the history of the novel, a major theme has been whether people can change their situations in life or whether they are in the grips of forces beyond their control. The literary school of naturalism, which emerged in the late 1800s in Europe and later spread to North America, explored the idea that people could not control their fates. Novelists such as Émil Zola of France and Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser of the United States were major figures in the naturalism movement. In his novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), American author John Steinbeck dramatizes a similar theme of loss of personal control by writing about the Joads, a family forced by economic changes to leave their land in Oklahoma to become migrant workers in California.

Other common themes in novels include how art and life are reflected in one another, the meaning of religion, and whether technology helps people or whether it is a harmful aspect of society.