Transcript The Art of Fiction 1

The Art of Fiction
Highlights from the book of the same name
Understanding the nuances,
methods and tricks of a novel
Introducing a character
• most important component of the novel
• antagonist=main character/s who
opponent/rival/enemy of the
• Protagonist ( the focal character)
• ways of representing them:
• major characters
• minor
• flat
• round
• keep POV in mind!
Introducing a character
• physical description & biographical
summary ( found in older fiction)
• conveyed gradually by action and/or
speech,
• Modern authors use synecdoche ( the part
standing in for the whole).
• Clothes are often indicators of character,
class, & lifestyle
A few minutes later, sally herself arrived.
“Am I terribly late, Fritz darling?”
“Only half an hour, I suppose, "Fitz drawled, beaming with proprietary pleasure. “May I
introduce Mr. Isherwood-Miss Bowles? Mr. Isherwood is commonly known as Chris.”
“I'm not,” he said. “Fritz is about the only person who’s ever called me Chris in my life.”
Sally laughed. She was dressed in black silk, with a small cape over her shoulders and a
little cap like a page-boy’s stuck jauntily on one side of her head:
“Do you mind if I use the telephone, sweet?”
“Sure, go ahead.” Fritz caught my eye. “Come into the other room Chris. I want to show
you something.” He was evidently longing to hear my first impression of Sally, his new
acquisition.
“For heaven’s sake, don’t leave me alone with this man!” she explained. “Or he'll seduce
me down the telephone. He’s most terribly passionate.”
As she dialed the number, I noticed that her finger-nails were painted emerald green, a
color unfortunately chosen, for it called attention to her hands, which were much stained by
cigarette smoking and as dirty as a little girl’s. She was dark enough to be Fritz’s sister. Her
face was long and thin, powdered a dead white. She had very large brown eyes which should
have been darker, to march her hair and the pencil she used for her eyebrows.
“Hilloo,” she cooed, pursing her brilliant cherry lips as though she were going to kiss the
mouthpiece: “Ist das Du, mein Liebling?” Her mouth opened fatuously sweet smile. Fritz
and I sat watching her, like a performance at the theatre.
Goodbye to Berlin Christopher Isherwood
Allegory- a symbolic narrative
everything is a metaphor
Now, when he got up to the top of the hill, there
came two men running to meet him amain: the
name of the one was Timorous, and the other,
Mistrust, to whom Christian said, Sirs, what’s the
matter? You run the wrong way. Timorous
answered, that they were going to the City of
Zion, and had got up that difficult place; but said
he, the further we go, the more danger we meet
with; wherefore we turned, and are going back
again.
The Pilgrim’s Progress John Bunyan
Allegory
• determined by its one-to-one
correspondence to the implied meaning.
• Examples: Gulliver’s Travels, Animal farm,
and Erewhon ( no where spelled backwards)
Allegory is another technique of
defamiliarization.
defamiliarization
Taking that which is familiar and presenting it in
a way where the reader cannot identify a place,
culture, personality, belief, religion, etc
thereby
allowing the reader to see something without
prejudice or bias
So far, however, as I could collect anything certain, I gathered they they have
two distinct currencies, each under the control of its own bank and mercantile
codes. One of these ( the one with the Musical Banks) was supposed to be the
system, and to give out the currency in which all monetary transactions should be
carried on; as far as I could see, all who wished to be considered respectable, kept
a larger or smaller balance at these banks. On the other hand, if there is one thing
of which I am more sure than another, it is that the amount so kept had no
distinct commercial value in the outside world; I am sure that the managers and
cashiers of the Musical banks were not paid in their own currency. Mr. Nosnibor
used to go to these banks, or rather to the great mother bank of the city,
sometimes but not very often. He was a pillar of one of the other kinds of banks,
though he appeared to hold some minor office also in the musical ones. The ladies
generally went alone; as indeed was the case in most families, except on state
occasions.
I had long wanted to know more of this strange system, and had the greatest
desire to accompany my hostess and her daughters. I had seen them go out almost
every morning since my arrival and had noticed that they carried their purses in
their hands, not exactly ostentatiously, yet just so that those who met them should
see wither they were going. I had never, however, yet been asked to go with them
myself.
Erewhon Samuel Butler
Epiphany
• definition: a showing.
• In Christian terminology it denotes the
showing of the infant Jesus to the 3 Magi.
• James Joyce applied the word to the process
by which a commonplace event or
thought is transformed into a thing of
timeless beauty
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Epiphany
• applied to any descriptive passage in which
the external reality has transcendental
significance (in laymen’s terms the Ah-Ha
moment)
• In modern fiction it provides a climax/
resolution
• Often contains synaesthesia ( mixing of the
senses)
They reach the tee, a platform of turf besides a hunched
backed fruit tree offering fists of taut poles. “I better go first,”
Rabbit says, “Till you calm down.” His heart is hushed, held in
mid-beat, by anger. He doesn’t care about anything except
getting out of this mess. He wishes it would rain. In avoiding
looking at Eccles he looks at the ball, which sits high on the tee
and already seems free of the ground. Very simply he brings the
clubhead around his shoulder into it. The sound has a
hollowness, a singleness he hasn’t heard before. His arm force
his head up and his ball is hung way out, lunarly pale against the
beautiful black blue of storm clouds, his grandfather’s color
stretched dense across the east. It recedes along a line straight
as a ruler-edge. Stricken; sphere, star, speck. It hesitates, and
Rabbit thinks it will die, but he is fooled, for the ball makes this
hesitation, the ground of a final leap: with a kind of visible sob
takes a last bite of space before vanishing in falling. “That’s it!”
he cries and, turning to Eccles with a smile of aggrandizement,
repeats, “That’s it.”
Rabbit, Run John Updike
Names
• Often symbolic, if not then they’re ironic
• Names act subliminally on readers
• Beware of androgynous names (Lee, Pat,
Kelly, Chris)
• May be subject to cliché or stereotype
• Ex: Barbie, Daisy, Lance, Jane, Peter ( Peter
Pan, Apostle Peter, the slang term) Dick (
jerk or player or both?)
Names
In the
The Crying of Lot 49
San Diego recluse
Thomas Pynchon
gives his characters the
following names
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Oedipa Maas
Mucho Maas
Pierce Inverarity
Metzgar
Mike Fallopian
Many di Presso
Randolph Driblette
Clayton Chiclitz
Dr. Hilarius
Stanley Koteks
Emory Bortz
Ghengis Cohen
Lists
Authors use lists for many different reasons
and
have a reason and purpose
for the catalogue of items
• Lists can be: letters, diaries, depositions,
lists, descriptions, texts, emails,
Lists
The miscellaneousness of a list is not random, but has meaning.
Ask yourself WHY the list is written in particular way
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Random: Indicative of life? Character? Or conflict?
Logical: Indicative of society? Character,? Conflict? Is it ironic?
Hierarchy of items: Indicative of society? Character?
Hierarchy of importance: same as above
Groupings of items: same as above
One thing out of place? Look for: “which of these things is not like the
other” (hear Sesame street song in the background?)
Figure out why author included a list!
• The things they carried were largely
determined by necessity. Among the
necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can
openers, pocket knives, heat tabs,
wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellant,
chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets,
packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, swing
kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations,
and two or three canteens of water. Together
these items weighed between 15 and 20 lbs,
depending upon a man’s habits or rate of
metabolism
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The Things They Carried
Beginnings
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First sentence-first paragraph
Entrance into the author’s fictional world
should draw us in
No easy task because the reader is not
familiar with the author’s tone, vocabulary,
syntactic habits, etc.
• Reader has a lot of info to absorb and
remember
Ways to begin novel
• 1.BAM! In the middle of a conversation
• 2. Self introduction by narrator: “ Call me Ishmael.” Moby Dick
• 3. Or a rude gesture to literary tradition: Catcher in the Rye)
• "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll
probably want to know is where I was born, and what my
lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were
occupied and all before they had me, and all that David
Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it,
if you want to know the truth.“
• 4.A philosophical discussion
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To the front of Hohen- Cremmon , county
seat of the von Briest family since the time of
Elector George Wilhelm, bright sunshine fell
on the midday silence in the village street,
while on the side facing the park and gardens
a wing was built on at right angles cast its
broad shadow first on a white and green
flagstone path, then out over a roundel of
flowers with a sundial at its contre and a
border of canna lilies and rhubarb round the
edge.
• Effi Briest
The Intrusive Author
• A rhetorical trick.
• “Dear Reader”
• used to incorporate knowledge and
proverbial wisdom
• Fell out of favor during 19th century.
• Modern fiction tends to eliminate or
suppress the authorial voice because of its
God-like presence in an age of skeptical
realism. (May be coming back in vogue again)
Why use an Intrusive author
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Provides author platform to:
Vent
Explain
Indulge his philosophies
Deflect
Humor
Mock
trick
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With a single drop of ink for a mirror,
the Egyptian sorcerer undertook to
reveal any chance comer far-reaching
visions of the past. This is what I
undertake to do for you, reader. With
this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I
will show you the roomy workshop of
Jonathon Burge, carpenter and builder
in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared
on the 18th of June, in the year of Our
Lord, 1799.
George Elliot Adam Bede
Magical Realism
• marvelous and impossible events occur
in what otherwise is a realistic narrative.
• Usually associated with Latin-American
fiction from authors Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Isabelle
Allende, Laura Esquivel
Magical Realism
An impossible event whereby the reader
suspends disbelief
because
the narrative so powerfully and
poignantly expresses emotions
The moment they took their first bite of
the cake, everyone was flooded with a great
wave of longing. Even Pedro, usually so
proper, was having trouble holding back his
tears. Mama Elena, who hadn’t shed a tear
over her husbands death, was sobbing
silently. But the weeping was just the first
symptom of a strange intoxication.- an acute
attack of pain and frustration- seized the
guests and scattered the across the patio and
the grounds and in the bathrooms, all of
them wailing over lost love.
Like Water For Chocolate
Stream of Consciousness
• The continuous flow of thought and
sensation in the human mind
• Includes: reasoning, emotions, sensations,
memories & fantasies
• Usually generates sympathy for the
character whose inner thoughts the reader
is exposed to, ( no matter how vain,
immoral, or selfish)
Stream of consciousness
• 2 techniques for representing consciousness
1.Interior monologue: where character is verbalizing
their thoughts as they occur
2. Free indirect style: 3rd person past tense.
• Uses vocabulary of character but deletes “ she thought”,
“he wondered” etc
• This gives the illusion of intimate access to the
character’s mind without surrounding the authorial
voice
• Sometimes indicated by italics-but this is falling out of
favor
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy
had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their
hinges: Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought
Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning- fresh as if issued to children on a
beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her
when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now,
she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into
the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air
was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave;
chill and sharp and yet ( for a girl of eighteen as she then was)
solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that
something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the
trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling;
standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the
vegetables?”- was that it? “I prefer men to cauliflowers?- was that it?
He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone
out on the terrace- Peter Walsh.
Mrs. Dalloway
Unreliable narrator
• A character-narrator cannot be 100%
reliable.
• The point of using an unreliable
narrator is to reveal the gap between
perception and reality
• to show how humans distort and
conceal
• A reliable narrator would be boring
Reasons to use an Unreliable
narrator
The narrator may:
• be a dramatically different age than the people in the story, such
as a child attempting to explain adult actions
• have prejudices about race, class, or gender
• have low intelligence
• suffer from hallucinations or dementia
• be a pathological liar, narcissist, psychopath, sociopath
• be trying to make a point that’s contrary to the actions of the
story or be attempting to libel one of the characters due to a
grudge
• Whatever the flaw, at some point the reader will realize the
narrator’s interpretation of the events cannot be fully trusted
and will form a different opinion
Problems with unreliable
narrators
• may put off readers
• may be pulled out of the story when they realize the
narrator cannot be trusted.
• there’s a fine line between distrusting the narrator
and distrusting the writer.
• when done badly, a story written from this pointof-view can be viewed as manipulative, misleading,
confusing and pretentious.
• when successful, the results are powerful and
fascinating.
• some of the greatest works of the twentieth century
used unreliable narrators.
examples of books with
unreliable narrators include
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Some examples of books with unreliable narrators include:
To Kill a Mockingbird (child narrator)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (dementia)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (drug-fueled hallucinations)
A Clockwork Orange (skewed societal views)
The Catcher in the Rye (narrator personality flaws)
Fight Club (multiple personality disorder)
Portnoy’s Complaint (personality disorder)
Lolita (narrator attempting to manipulate interpretation)
Pale Fire (narrator grudge, dementia, literary prejudice
Irony
• saying the opposite of what you mean
• Inviting an interpretation different from the
surface meaning of the words
3 types of irony
• Dramatic - audience knows something
about present or future circumstances that
the character does not know
• Verbal - A contradiction of expectation
between what is said and what is meant
• Situational-A contradiction of expectation
between what might be expected and
what actually occurs (found with fatalistic
or pessimistic view of life)
Example of Dramatic Irony
• Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
• Oedipus searches to find the murderer of
the former king of Thebes, only to discover
that it is himself, which is known to the
audience all along.
Example of Verbal Irony
• Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
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"Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honorable man.“
• Spoken by Marc Antony
Example of Situational Irony
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by
Coleridge
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Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink ;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink
Point of View
• Real events are usually experienced by more than one
person. A novel can provide different perspectives on the
same event -but only one at a time
• Even an omniscient method is not all encompassing,
but benefits and concentrates on just the
important/relevant characters
• The choice of POV is the most important single
decision that the novelist makes- because it
fundamentally affects the way the readers will
respond emotionally and morally to the fictional
characters and their actions
Objective POV
Tells what happens without stating more than can be inferred
from the story's action and dialogue.
• The narrator never discloses anything about what the
characters think or feel, remaining a detached observer.
• 2nd person: author addresses reader
• 3rd person
• does not participate in the action of the story as one of
the characters, but lets us know exactly how the characters
feel.
• Characters revealed through this outside voice.
1st person POV
• Character’s own voice.
• uses “I” throughout
• reader doesn’t know any more than character does.
• Example: I was minding my own business when Mom burst in.
“What’s with you?” I grumbled.
• If the reader is to know that Mom is angry, it must be shown through
her words and body language available to the “I” character, and not
through Mom’s thoughts (unless psychic abilities are one of the
narrator’s traits).
3rd person POV
he said / she said
• Example: He gripped the dollar bill tightly. “You can’t have
it,” he told her.
• Depending on author’s choice,
• it can be very limited, pulling the reader into the head of
the narrator,
• or completely omniscient, letting readers see all the
characters’ thoughts.
Omniscient POV
Advantage: author accesses thoughts of
various characters.
Disadvantage: constant reminder of a
constructed story, and adds some distance
between reader and characters.
• When used by less-skilled writers, the result is often a muddled
jumping-about of thoughts
• Examples of stories with an omniscient POV include:
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
• The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende (alternates limited and
omniscient)
Limited Point of View
• Only what character sees or knows. First person is obviously limited,
but many third person stories are as well
• Characters are revealed through their thoughts, feelings, body
language , dialog
• The writer also can’t include description such as “the usual vase of
flowers sat on the table,” unless the narrator knows that it is usual for
flowers to be there.
• Many books today are written with a limited POV, including:
• The Harry Potter books by JK Rowling
• Come to Grief by Dick Francis
Multiple Points of View
• A story with multiple points of view is not the same as
omniscient.
• Multiple viewpoints let the reader into different characters’
heads by making complete narrative switches, usually
in different sections or chapters. Within those sections,
however, the narrator is held to a single, usually limited,
viewpoint.
• Stories using multiple POVs include:
• The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy
• The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards
• The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares
Narrative Structure
• All stories have a beginning, middle , and end,
however ambiguous it might be.
• (As defined by Aristotle)
Beginning=nothing needs to come before
End= nothing needs to follow
Middle=needs something before & after
Why did author use a particular structure?
What is the effect?
God of Small Things: past and present interwoven, ends with past event
Running in the Family: Frame story with random memories,
conversations, chapters and subchapters
Structure vs story arc
We can know the end of a story at
the beginning, but not necessarily
how/when/where is happened.
Regardless of how author structures
the events, the novel still provides a
story arc with a sense of finality or
understanding
Chronology is different than story arc
Ending
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Difference between short story and novel:
Short story
Read at one sitting
End-expectation/anticipated conclusion
Last sentence/paragraph twist
• Novel
• Read at irregular intervals
• If it’s good we don’t want it to end.
Ending
A novel is vastly different from a movie
because the reader
can see how many pages are left
(ebook location or physical pages)
• whereas
a film’s end can take you by surprise.
Ralph looked at him dumbly. For a moment he had a fleeting picture of
the strange glamour that had once been invested the beaches. But the
island was scorched like dead wood-Simon was dead-and Jack had…The
tears began to flow and sobs shook him. He gave himself up to them now
for the first time on the island: great, shuddering spasms of grief that
seemed to wrench his whole body. His voice rose under the black smoke
before the burning wreckage of the island; and infected by that emotion,
the other little boys began to shake and sob too. And in the middle of them,
with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of
innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the
true, wise friend called Piggy.
The officer, surrounded by these noises, was moved and little
embarrassed. He turned away to give them time to pull themselves
together; and waited, allowing his eyes to rest on the trim cruiser in the
distance.
Lord of the Flies William Golding
The End