Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Deus Ex Machina

Continuing with our Greek inheritance, the next indispensable term for contemporary novel studies is one which, unlike many of the others, has not found a comfortable home in contemporary popular usage. Like the others, it has come to us through Latin, but unlike the others it is composed of three words, rather than a single word, and so it is more difficult to slide into English sentences. You can slip a word like nemesis into a sentence without breaking stride, but deus ex machina does not roll off the tongue the same way, and becomes the focus of the listener's attention, taking away from the thrust of the sentence.

Translated directly, deus ex machina means god from the machine, and derives from Greek tragedians' use of a mechanism to hoist an actor aloft and lower him into a given scene in his portrayal of a god. By today's standards, of course, this would be considered ridiculous, as our suspension of disbelief is far more limited. However, the term, if not the original theatrical meaning, has survived into the present day through a metonymic shift. The mechanical aspects of the deus ex machina have been excised, and the gods have been (for the most part) stricken from consideration, but the general function the device was most often used to produce has been identified with the term.

Deus ex machina now refers to the insertion of an event or series of events that helps to forward the plot and helps the protagonist overcome otherwise insurmountable difficulties. The events are usually characterized by their unconnected, unexpected, and at times random nature. For the Greeks and Romans, this was completely acceptable, since part of their worldview involved the activity of the gods that could change the course of their lives in an instant, with little explanation or apparent motivation. Today, the intentional use of deus ex machina is only really effective in comedies, or in works that are very self-consciously trying to reflect the classical form of the device. If a critic discusses the use of deus ex machina in a serious contemporary novel, she is likely pointing to it as a flaw in the work. It is widely agreed that a plot should follow in a logical manner, and that earlier elements should prepare the way for those that follow. One event is motivated by those that come before it, and anyone looking at the whole (after having read the work in its entirety) should be able to show the complex series of causes, effects, relations, and reasons for the important events. In the case of deus ex machina, however, the reader is not granted this kind of integrated connection, and the event in question seems to appear out of nowhere. It is unpredictable, unmotivated, and is most obviously inserted to solve a particular difficulty which the author was unable to get past through other means. It abruptly defuses dramatic tension, confuses catharsis, and demarcates an unnatural-feeling episode break.

A simplified example of deus ex machina occurs in a novel where the protagonist, a very poor old man, is striving against his former employer in an attempt to get the pension which should be his after having worked for the same company over the last 50 years. Things are going poorly for him, and it looks as though he is finally going to lose the struggle. The bank is threatening foreclosure on his home, and without his pension, there is no way he is going to be able to keep making payments. As he begins packing his meager belongings with a caring social worker, feeling the proceedings are going poorly, he finds in the attic his old comic and card collection which he thought his mother had sold decades earlier. He is at first delighted that this part of his youth still exists for him to reminisce about wherever he ends us, but his social worker points out that they are likely worth a lot of money now, and an appraiser confirms they are worth millions! The man sells most of them off, becomes rich, and keeps his home. Since nothing prepared us for this vital, life-altering occurrence, it is a clear example of deus ex machina.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Catharsis

As we discussed in a previous article on hamartia, hubris, and nemesis, the influence of the Greeks, especially Aristotle, in the area of novel studies, has been significant, and their terminology remains with us to this day. Catharsis is one such Greek term that has found a limited home in contemporary culture, and although it is still considered somewhat highbrow, its use in the popular media has spread beyond sophisticated educational programming. Most of us have heard the term cathartic used in everyday conversation, and we usually understand it to mean causing us to have a good cry. This strikes to the heart of the term as it is used in literary studies, and although its meaning is more expansive, the emotional response involved is integral.

Catharsis comes from the Greek, as we mentioned above, and means cleansing, purifying, or purging. Of course, just as they were for the ancient Greeks, these terms are intertwined in English, and are all related through linguistic use and ritual. The idea of dirtiness carries with it the concomitant idea of contamination, which is the addition of something foreign (and unwanted) to a given (desirable) substance. In order to make something clean, we must remove (or purge) the undesirable substance, the contamination, from it. Once this purging takes place, we are left with the pure substance, and so this whole process can be known as purification.

We have also taken this literal process and applied it metaphorically, giving us the idea of ritual purification, where we take something that is considered spiritually unclean, and purge the contamination (or evil) from it, to leave us once again with a pure (or holy) substance. The act of confession in the Catholic Church, for example, uses these ideas in an act of ritual purification; the soul is made unclean through the contamination of sin, and by verbalizing the sin, we expel it from ourselves and are thus free of it, leaving the purged soul pure and clean once more.

As we use the term in literary studies today, catharsis refers to the emotional experience an audience undergoes in response to a dramatic situation. The emotional experience must be intense, extreme, and rapid, and is often described as climactic. The emotion associated with catharsis is usually great sadness or pity, but it can also be lighter, involving joy or exhilaration. The most evident and effective examples of this phenomenon occur when, through the course of a literary work, we are moved rapidly from extremes of joy, to sorrow, and back again. Catharsis must involve a sense of release, a feeling of tension expelled after a significant period of build-up. It is emotionally satisfying, and it offers a sense of completion and closure in a literary work that is difficult to achieve without it.

It must be remarked, however, that catharsis is not merely a matter of portraying characters that go through such emotional highs and lows as we have been discussing here. Catharsis is something that can happen to characters, to be sure, but the term is primarily used to refer to the reactions of audiences and readers, not characters. It seems like the two may go hand in hand, but the difference is a vital distinction to make. After all, a complete hack can write a tale about characters who have cathartic experiences; after all, the author creates the characters and can make them do and feel anything at all. However, it takes a talented author to present a world full of compelling characters and situations which involve readers to a high degree. This ability to engage readers is absolutely essential to leading them through a cathartic experience, and if the readers can feel no empathy for the characters in a given novel, catharsis will not be achieved.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Hamartia, Hubris, Nemesis

Although the novel is, well, a relatively novel literary form, many of the terms that animate its study are much older. To paint a rough portrait of the novel's ancestry, one might take drama, combine it with folklore, and add a healthy smattering of myth (including religious texts). Since drama and myth are the oldest and most serious of these forms, with drama providing the most vibrant form of mythical retelling and adaptation, it is no surprise that the earliest literary criticism and theory comes from the ancient Greeks, from whom we have inherited a substantial and influential literary tradition. The most notable of the Greeks writing on the tenets of literature, specifically drama, was none other than Aristotle, and his Poetics continues to be the bedrock upon which contemporary theory rests.

As a result of this, many strange-looking Greek terms have found a permanent home in novel studies, and the three listed above, hamartia, hubris, and nemesis, are among the most popular of these. Many have found a limited home in popular culture, and some have been co-opted by news agencies as synonyms for various common English words. If you hear hamartia on CNN, it means great flaw, and is often synonymous with hubris, which means arrogance. In this television context, nemesis refers to someone's great enemy, and while all of these definitions contribute to what each of these terms means in literary studies, they also limit them so severely that much of their power is lost.

Hamartia will usually be defined by your English teacher as tragic flaw, and this is an important aspect of the term. Hamartia is often described as the quality possessed by a character which results in her undoing, the essential character flaw which results in a tragic outcome. However, some scholars argue that this is a slight mistranslation of the term, and that what Aristotle really intended by the term was an action, any action, taken by the character which results in a tragic conclusion. The difference between these alternative interpretations seems subtle and unimportant, but it can make a great difference in identifying the term. After all, there is a significant difference in your evaluation of me if I mess things up because I have made a single mistake, as opposed to messing things up because I have an indelible character trait which has caused me to act the way I did. When using the term, make sure to first understand how your professor or teacher is using it. You can then choose to use it the same way, or really impress them by explaining how using it each way reveals something different about the protagonist of the story.

Hubris is most often defined as overweening pride, and this definition will usually suffice, although it does contain additional aspects, and can be significantly broadened. Again, some scholars have pointed out that hubris isn't precisely pride itself, but rather a character's own belief in his invincibility; this indicates that he believes he is not subject to the mercies of the gods and the fates as other human beings are, which constitutes an offence against the heavens. So, it is this failure to respect the rules of the gods that constitutes the hubris, not merely one's puffed-up self opinion. As a result of this failure and accompanying arrogance, the gods traditionally mete out punishments, and this has been characterized by a deity, Nemesis, who would levy the penalties imposed. She is a goddess of just desserts, and her name came to represent such righteous punishment in general. Currently, the word nemesis is also used to describe a person or thing which is the arch-enemy of another, the one whom they strive against constantly, and who often gains the upper hand. This is the most common use in popular culture, and the one you are most likely to encounter on the news or in a film. The more expansive aspects of the definition discussed above are mainly confined to literary criticism, and will likely only find a welcome home in such circles.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Poetic Justice

Although this term seems to be going through a lull in the popular consciousness, the idea of poetic justice is still a powerful and appealing one that makes for some highly entertaining and satisfying conclusions to both films and novels. The term itself can lead to some confusion, since it has little to do with poetry as we know it today, but in its enactment there is certainly still an element of elegance that could be considered poetic. The idea of poetic justice has become closely associated with strong irony, and the best examples from contemporary literature and film posses this highly ironic quality.

In its original inception, poetic justice was merely a term used to describe the process whereby the good were rewarded in a given fictional work and the evil were punished. The idea was that works of fiction were really only valuable in as far as they conveyed a positive social lesson, and showed morality as the way to success, whereas vice was portrayed as the surest path to ruin, not only spiritually, but on earth as well. In reality, good is not clearly rewarded more than evil, nor is evil necessarily punished more than good; however, in a fictive tale, such inconvenient truths could be circumvented to create a strong, consistent moral system of reward and punishment which aligned with contemporary morality.

However, this only explains part of our idea of poetic justice today, as punishment for the evil and reward for the good is no longer sufficient to define the term. In fact, with the rise of modernist literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, tales which reinforced morality and ignored reality became less and less popular, as authors began to favor tales that captured something of the hard-edged injustice which is an indelible aspect of human existence. It was in this period that a strong element of irony was imprinted on poetic justice, to the point where it is now a necessary part of its definition. Today, poetic justice does not necessarily have to punish evil and reward good, though one or the other of these is still common, especially the former. The primary requirement is that a character has an event befall him which is a direct result of or comment on his own actions, personality, or speech.

As we discussed in a previous series, irony occurs when the opposite of what is expected to happen happens, or the opposite of what is said is intended. It is this first kind of irony, known as situational irony, that animates poetic justice. For example, suppose we have a character that produces low-quality bullets for a living. At various times in the novel, he comments that he is making a fortune from these substandard projectiles, and that he has been able to successfully bribe all those who would otherwise report his dangerous and ineffective products to the authorities. In the final scene, an inspector who has refused his bribes finds himself held at gunpoint by the greedy unscrupulous bullet manufacturer. The producer laughs, tells the inspector that his body will never be found, and fires the weapon; it backfires, killing the owner and leaving the inspector unharmed! The man is killed by his own faulty bullets, a fitting way for his empire to crumble, and a just desert for his dangerous irresponsible behavior. Here, poetic justice is fully manifested; the evil are punished, and there is a strong ironic reversal which involves the evildoer dying as the result of his own evil actions, and being brought low by the very thing that vaulted him to prosperity.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Comic Relief

Most of us have no problem pointing to comic relief when we see it, although its purpose and specific function might not be clear in the abstract. The comic part is simple enough, to be sure, but the idea of this comedy relieving something needs to be explored more thoroughly in order to make sense of the term. It is this distinction that makes Hamlet's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern excellent examples of comic relief, while Adam Sandler's character Happy Gilmore from the eponymous film is not.

Comic relief occurs when, during the progression of a serious work, lighter, amusing or even downright funny events take place, in contrast to the tone of the rest of the work. Looking at the examples presented above, we can see how this distinction applies. Halmet is a tragedy, a serious work full of high drama and weighty speech. The characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are somewhat unintelligent, bumbling, and prime targets for ridicule. Hamlet takes full advantage of this, and makes fools of them throughout the play, providing humor in spurts throughout an otherwise serious work. Happy Gilmore, on the other hand, is presented as a thoroughly comic work throughout, and its main character is himself a person whom we would find easy to ridicule. As a result, comic relief is impossible, because there is no serious action to be relieved from.

The ideas of contrast, variety, and entertainment are paramount to the concept of comic relief, and there is a very natural tendency to appreciate this which is by no means a modern invention. Shakespeare, in the example above and in many other instances, includes characters who are highly comic, and his work is seldom without the figure of the fool who intertwines comedy with wisdom. Indeed, he sometimes devoted entire subplots to comic relief, and the Caliban party in The Tempest is a fine, humorous example of this. Going even further back, we can see that the ancient Greek playwrights understood the importance of comic relief, and while their individual serious plays were too focused and conventionally limited to include the range of characters and situations comic relief requires, the overall structure of their dramatic festivals included an important comic element. During the annual festival held in Athens, each playwright would present a cycle of three related tragedies, which were the primary focus of the competition. However, they would also include a related farce, a satirical play which parodied many of the elements and themes of the tragic cycle. With such heavy, serious, often highly depressing subject matter dominating the festival, these moments of lightness and mirth were a welcomed counterpoint, and helped to establish a balance which would otherwise have been lost; after all, I am more likely to appreciate the pathos of a given scene if I am not thoroughly immersed in pathos already.

Comic relief is most often presented in the form of a specific character, who is involved with the major characters but whose actions do not contribute much to the overall plot. These characters must have some relation to the larger story as a whole, and their actions may inadvertently change the outcome of a novel, but they remain constantly on the periphery. Otherwise, they would not provide relief, but would turn the work into a comedy. Another method for creating comic relief is to place the major characters in an unexpected situation which is (usually) less dangerous but far more absurd. Picture for a moment a band of monks who, during their long and arduous journey to a far-off shrine, find that their progress is now being stopped by a huge army of ferocious bunnies. The battle between the monks and the diminutive rodents would not pose a serious danger to the party, but it would be hilarious, providing an excellent comic counterpoint to the seriousness of the plot.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Direct Address, Intrusive Narrator

As we explored in a previous article, a work of fiction is most often presented to us as if it were not a work of fiction or imagination at all, but rather a series of events unfolding in front of our eyes in reality. It is obvious that the words on the page in front of us have been written down by an individual, carefully considered to create certain effects, and then rammed through a printing press and reproduced thousands or even millions of times. However, whenever we read a good novel, we get the distinct impression that the words on the page are speaking to us specifically, and that the realm which comes to occupy our imagination exists. This is the great deception of the novel, and the reason for its success.

One of the reasons the illusion of the novel is so easy to believe is that novels tend to make clear and inviolable distinctions between the different worlds, real and fictional, that must exist for a story to come to be experienced. The majority of novels are written in the third-person, and omniscience is a common feature of most narrators, meaning that we are told the story not from the perspective of an individual, but rather from a position in time and space outside of personhood altogether. It is as if the story were telling itself, since the narrating agent makes no reference to herself nor to the act of writing the story. The novel unfolds like a natural phenomenon rather than a completely artificial human construction.

In the case of I narration or narration done in the third-person by a character in the world of the story, a different approach is used but the effect is largely the same. The narrator in these cases often uses references to self, but they are firmly situated in their own worlds, and we get the feeling that we are looking in on them as they are recalling events that were important to them. There is no mention made of the production of the book we are reading, and there is no acknowledgement that the world of the story and the world of the reader are distinct and exist on entirely different ontological levels. The real world and the world of the text are kept apart, and so no collision ruining the illusion of the novel is possible.

There are some novels, however, that decide very deliberately to destroy the illusion that most novels try so hard to maintain. In them, the narrator talks to the reader directly, and treats her as a reader. This is known as direct address, and serves to chip away at, or at least to expose, the divisions between the textual world and the real world, as in the following example: "Come with me on a journey, gentle reader, as I lead you down a path strewn with snare and brambles. I have written it especially for you, and I hope you will find it as entertaining to travel as I did to create."

Direct address is a favorite device of many postmodern authors who desire to lay bare the trappings of their fictions to appeal to their readers on a different level, and who desire to tell a story as much about their telling the story as about the traditional content of the story itself. A narrator who does this frequently in a novel is known as an intrusive narrator, which just shows how unusual this practice is; apparently, the narrator is supposed to remain invisible and personally uninvolved in the unfolding of the story, making any self-references intrusions on the real action of the story. The intrusive narrator is often productive of humor in the novel, and while this is not always the case, most times the involved narrating agent cannot help injecting a little mirth into the veins of his or her story.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Realism, Verisimilitude, Suspension of Disbelief

All of us have a basic idea of what realism indicates with regard to fictional works, and we are quick to point out when something is unrealistic or completely unbelievable. This is most often a condemnation of the work in question, and it is difficult to immerse ourselves in the work after this. None of this would be possible without definite ideas about realism, verisimilitude, and suspension of disbelief, and although you might not even know what these terms mean for literary studies (yet), you definitely have opinions about them which you likely expressed recently in English class or after a movie.

To begin as vaguely and broadly as possible, we can turn to realism, a term that is used in both a general and more technical way. The more specialized use of this term in literature applies to an informal but powerful trend of the 19th century to write about the present day in modern language focusing specifically on current moral and social problems. Realism encouraged a move away from inflated characters and implausible plots, as well as from the excesses of sensibility and feeling the Romantics preferred.

In a way, this was a step along the path of the broader, and, for the purposes of this discussion at least, more important definition of realism that is not limited to a given time and place, but which has existed in some form through the history of human storytelling. People have always been concerned with how real something is, whether it is composed of truth or lies, fact or fiction. In his Republic, Plato condemned the poets for spreading lies, and this attitude has survived through to the present day, though in a significantly altered form. Each succeeding generation of storytellers and writers tends to look down upon the writing of those who came before as naive, simplistic, and not very applicable to modern reality. As a result, the idea of realism is constantly evolving, as what one generation was willing to accept as real is seen increasingly as unrealistic by the next.

In film, the special effects of the mid 20th century seemed very real for contemporary audiences, and were significantly better than those of the previous decades, and were especially effective compared to the limited effects of the theater. Now, those effects are at times laughable, and our standards for realism in that realm have risen dramatically. This is a least part of the reason why I, as well as several friends my age I have spoken to, find the theater difficult to attend and enjoy. We all enjoy reading various genres, including poetry and drama, and we see movies regularly, but the consensus we all reached independently is that plays feel somewhat silly. The level of realism is so far below that of film, the dominant form throughout our lives, that theatre always seems unreal, and therefore difficult to immerse ourselves in. There are exceptions to this, of course, such as many of Ibsen's works that involve such sparse sets and intimate, personal exchanges that actually gain something from their live presentation, but anytime a play tries to imitate reality in way that goes beyond character, it tends to destroy the illusion audiences have come to expect. This is perhaps one of the reasons why drama has made a significant shift into a more formalistic presentation, where the goal is not simply to present an interesting slice of life, but rather to engage the audience without worrying about the creation of an illusory world distinct from the actual physical production we see before us.

Because the dictates of realism have played such an important part in the creation of literature and other forms of art throughout history, critics have adopted some key terms for discussing it. With regard to the novel (although our vocabulary for film is basically the same since it was largely adapted from literary criticism), verisimilitude is a very long and complex-looking word with a deceptively simple meaning. To remember what this means, and perhaps even how to pronounce it, just think of the words very and similar, whose roots are also found in the term. If something has a high degree of verisimilitude, it is very similar to the way things are in real life.

Of course, as with most shortcuts and mnemonics, this oversimplifies the matter, but is does capture the basic meaning of the term. Verisimilitude is the measure of how much a given fictional event or series of fictional events mirrors what we would expect to happen in reality. Novels based closely on historical information and events tend to be the most verisimilar, and readers evaluate them largely on how well they resemble what is known to have actually happened. Even entirely fictional novels, however, are expected to possess a certain level of verisimilitude, which varies depending on the genre. Contemporary drama, for example, will look quite verisimilar, whereas romance novels will be expected to stray from what we would expect to happen. Even science fiction and fantasy are expected to possess a degree of verisimilitude, for while their worlds may be imaginative creations, the novel must still operate within the rules of the world as they are. Also, we expect characters to react according to certain common psychological assumptions, most notably that a character in a novel will behave in a way that is explicable in the same terms we would use to explain the behavior and personality of an actual person. People are willing to entertain alternate possibilities, but unrealistic character development and portrayal is unforgivable.

The degree of verisimilitude in a given novel is a crucial factor in determining how well able a reader is to suspend her disbelief. Suspension of disbelief is a term used to describe a reader's (or audience's) willingness to ignore certain elements surrounding the constructedness of a narrative, and to treat it as if it were actually happening. This suspension is vital to the enjoyment of many adventure novels, and in the world of film the classic 1980s action flicks like Rambo would be unwatchable without it. Picture for a moment what would actually happen if a lone man, without cover, approached an army of trained soldiers who were all carrying automatic weapons. He might kill a few of them, but he would be mowed down quickly; this, however, would make for a terrible film, so Rambo is able to defeat them, as implausible as this is.

Generic conventions again determine how much suspension is necessary for enjoyment, and it should be noted that each individual also brings a suspension threshold to his or her evaluation of any narrative, which is modified by expectations based on genre and mood. I was quite willing to read The Lord of The Rings novel trilogy, despite the time investment it took and the strictly impossible setting. However, a friend of mine scoffs at fantasy in general, and would never waste his time reading such impossible fiction. In any work of fiction, even the most realistic, we are aware from the start that we are not experiencing reality. As a result, we must be willing to believe in something that is strictly not real at all, meaning that even the most conservative of us who enjoy reading must play a little make-believe with ourselves in order to do it at all.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Free Indirect Discourse

I have found that the more complex a given term sounds, the more difficult it is for students to understand what it means. Certain terms receive a reputation for being extremely difficult, and thus become more difficult to learn as a result. This self-fulfilling prophecy is nowhere more apparent than in the example, to leave literary studies for a moment, of Einstein's theory of relativity. On a conceptual level, it could be explained to and comprehended by the average high-school student, but it has gained such a reputation for being unattainable by all but the most intelligent minds that many do not even attempt to learn about it, feeling that it is simply out of reach.

Now, I will not claim that free indirect discourse has achieved the same level of prominence and dread that relativity has, but in literary circles, free indirect discourse, also known as free indirect style (and hereafter known as FID), is the bane of young college scholars and the reddest part of most essays and exams. I believe this is because students first have it explained to them in a cursory manner, and are then expected to understand and apply it without really understanding what it is. As a result, they constantly get it wrong, and are thus convinced that the term is just too difficult. I hope this little article goes some way toward ameliorating this situation.

FID is a narrative method that removes the clear delineation between the thoughts and reflections of the narrator, and those of a given character, resulting in an unstable point of view and an unseated perspective. When FID is employed, we are not sure whose views we are hearing, and so we get a conflation of the narrator and a character that is often unsettling. The following example illustrates the principle in action:

Billy usually sat still and tried to look tiny when the Sparks brothers approached him, but this time there was no damned way those puffed-up blow-hards were going to get away with terrorizing the whole restaurant. Who did they think they were, anyway, that they could just march in here and act like they owned the place? Billy was sick of it, and his clenched fist would make sure those cocky rich kids would never take their invulnerability for granted again.

As you can see, the point of view here is certainly third-person, and since we are immersed in Billy's thoughts, it looks limited as well. The first part of sentence one fits the third-person limited perspective well, since the person, tone, and diction are all formal and sufficiently distant. The second half of senence one departs from the diction and tone of the first, however, as we move from neutral observation and report to much stronger language. Damned, puffed-up, blow-hards, and even terrorizing are far from neutral or objective terms, and it is unusual to see a third-person narrator using this kind of informal language.

Sentence two is even more extreme in its condemnation of the Sparks, and is phrased in the form of an angry rhetorical question. Perhaps the most telling word of all in this sentence is here, since a third-person narrator who is not a character would properly use there instead. This sentence is what FID is all about. The sentence seems to be emanating directly from Billy, even though it is not in quotation marks. It sounds like something he is thinking and would probably like to say, even though the narrator is its official source. His perspective and that of the narrator have been combined, and this halfway point between traditional narration and stream of consciousness is FID.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Stream of Consciousness

All of us are familiar with the common conventions of storytelling, and none of us has any difficulty in telling stories to our friends and families. If I asked you right now to compose a story which involved a tennis ball, three giraffes, and a swarm of locusts, you would encounter little difficulty, despite the fact that these things are not at all related. Now, you might not produce what people would consider a good story, but it would be identified as a story nonetheless. You might begin with "once upon a time," you would likely choose a third person omniscient point of view, and you would tell of some adventure the hero got into involving the necessary things, or you might even make one of these things the main character. There would likely be some dialogue, and what was happening at any given stage would be made clear, as would the setting, and the distinction between what is a real part of the story world, and what was happening in the minds of the characters and in the imagination of the narrator.

Now, abandon most of these conventions, and you are left with what is known as stream of consciousness narration. This is somewhat too simplistic, but it does capture some of the radical differences between this way of telling a story and the traditional ways of doing so. In stream of consciousness narration, we are not presented with tightly ordered prose that moves in clear lines toward predictable goals. Instead, we are presented with the loosely associated series of thoughts which enter and flow through the mind of a character or narrator, which is often highly chaotic and confusing. An exemplary passage from James Joyce's Ulysses, one of the first novels to employ this device extensively, will help to clarify what stream of consciousness narration looks like:

Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. A sugarsticky girl shovelling scoopfuls of creams for a christian brother. Some school treat. Bad for their tummies. Lozenge and comfit manufacturer to His Majesty the King. God. Save. Our. Sitting on his throne sucking red jujubes white.

First of all, you might get the sense after reading this that it really isn't narration at all, but instead just an assortment of disconnected words shuffled onto the page, with some punctuation sprinkled in for variety's sake. This might be a credible argument if this passage stood in isolation, but since it is nested in an entire novel with like narration, it becomes possible to understand what is being said, and what is happening in the fictional world.

Stream of consciousness narration seems like a radical departure from the "realistic" modes of narration that even today enjoy tremendous popularity, so it might come as a surprise that it was originally conceived as a more realistic manner of narrative expression, reflecting more accurately the complex operations of conscious and unconscious thought. Although we tend to believe that we think in ordered sentences according to the rules of grammar (more or less), in reality our conscious words and thoughts arise from the interplay between many different sensations interacting with the impressions left by previous sensations in conjunction with memory and feeling. What we are left with is not a straightforward expression of clear thoughts but a grammatically confusing pile of words and images. It is impossible to convey this precisely in words of any kind, since language is only one aspect of our conscious (and unconscious) minds, and so stream of consciousness narration is an interesting approximation which gives the right feeling despite being doomed to fail in the details.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Utopia, Dystopia

Although there has been a turn toward realism which has dominated literary writing almost since the birth of the novel, fantasies about wonderful and terrible fictional worlds have never stopped captivating our imaginations. The roots of utopia and dystopia stretch back to the dawn of writing, and likely much further, as human populations have placed ideas of heaven and hell, the original utopia-dystopia pair, at the center of their religious mythologies. No mater how bad or good the conditions of a society are in a given place at a given time, it is always possible for us to imagine it being better or worse, and this is at the core of -opia writing.

Although the idea for both of these terms has no definable start date, the terms themselves are much more recent. Utopia comes from the famous Latin text of that name written by Englishman Thomas Moore, describing the living conditions of recently discovered societies living in the new world (North America). These individuals are described in idyllic terms, with their primitive laws and customs being at once contrasted and compared to those of various European nations, which acts as a subtle parody and an effective (though highly indirect) satire. The term utopia has come to mean ideal place, or perfect land, but this is a slight betrayal of its etymological roots. Moore knew that eu was the right prefix to indicate that something was very good, but instead chose to call his novel utopia, employing the prefix u, meaning no or none. Because his work was also a satire, he was punning with the different prefixes, since his land was both an ideal place (in a way) and no place at all (because it did not really exist). This distinction was not really followed by those who coined the term in its modern usage, although it is interesting to note that many examples of utopia fiction do share the same satirical concerns as Moore's original.

Dystopia's history, on the other hand, is far shorter and far less complex. The term was conceived as a direct opposite to the term utopia, and did not enter the language until the term to which it was opposed had already become common in both popular and literary use. The dys prefix contains none of the interesting ambiguity of the prefixes discussed above, and only refers to something negative. Therefore, dystopia refers to worlds that are highly, horribly negative. Some of the most memorable and popular novels of the 20th century are dystopic, including Aldus Huxley's Brave New World, Ayn Rand's Anthem, and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Even more than utopic fiction, writing about dystopias tends to involve the creation of futuristic worlds, making them a commonplace in science fiction. The idea of a post-apocalyptic future, after a nuclear war or other totalizing disaster, is a common way to create a dystopia, and technology (or more often, the resultant lack on it) is often central.

Interesting effects are created when elements of both utopia and dystopia are presented in a single text, in a single world. In some of the examples of dystopia above, the worlds are first presented, from at least one perspective, as being idyllic, perfect lands where technology and strong government has resulted in the elimination of crime, poverty, and so on. However, as the novel progresses, we see that the price that has been paid for such a perfect world has been a large measure of what we consider essential to what makes us human, turning the seemingly perfect worlds into dystopic prisons.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Satire

The critical debate surrounding the precise definition of satire has been going on since at least the time of the Romans, who invented the form of the verse satire and who employed it frequently in their drama. If the critics have been wrestling with the term, students have found it almost impenetrable to formal definition, and when combined with such terms as sarcasm, irony, polemic, and parody, which all overlap with various aspects of satire, the result is a confusion that is difficult to untangle.

Satire is often referred to as a genre, and this contention is supportable, although I think it confuses the definition of genre somewhat. Instead, I would argue that satire is a mode of writing, a certain way of making statements and combining them that results in a given effect, and creates a MAT (Mood, Atmosphere, and/or Tone) which prepares the reader to take what is presented in a satirical way. Since satire has no specific content, and since it is not restricted to a given form or even a single style, it resides in a more subtle distinction that genre can provide.

A satire is a work that points out the problems and follies of a given entity through some combination of wit, irony, parody, sarcasm, and exaggeration. The work must treat its subject extensively, and must hold it up for ridicule by highlighting its most representative features. Humor, while perhaps not absolutely essential for satire to be present, is almost never absent in a satirical work, and even the most hard-edged satirical attacks employ humor to achieve their libelous, defaming goals. If a novel or other literary work causes us to look at something and laugh at it (though never with it; if the thing is trying to be funny or ridiculous, it ceases to be a good target for satire), we are likely in the presence of satire. Good examples in contemporary culture include comic "roasts," where an individual is held up for ridicule in a good-natured but often very biting way, and such late-night comic variety skit shows as Saturday Night Live and Mad TV, as well as the monologues of such hosts as Jay Leno and David Letterman. No target is off limits, and the more outrageous the accusations and the more exaggerated the portrayals, the more amusing and satirical the comedy becomes.

Perhaps more than any other literary mode, satire relies heavily on its audience, as well as the cultural content in which it exists. In other works of fiction, whether historical or fantastic, the reader does not need to know anything very specific to understand and enjoy the work. Even in the case of a work of historical fiction, the reader may benefit from knowing about the details of the event being described, but because the novel will illustrate the events anyway, such prior knowledge is not necessary. Satire, on the other hand, simply ceases to exist in the presence of an audience that does not know the entities which are the targets of the satire. Imagine a parody of the American president, for example, which satirizes his poor command of the written and spoken word. The potential for comedy is certainly there without knowledge of the actual president, but there can be no satire if the audience does not realize that the president is actually not linguistically adept, a trait which is being exaggerated in the parody. One of the best literary examples comes from Swift's A Modest Proposal, where he suggests that the solution to the problems with the Irish poor is the consumption of their children by the English! At the time it was written, the conflict between the British and Irish would have been well known, and the various figures and proposals which are being satirized would have been prominent in the public consciousness. Many students today, however, see the work as sincere, rather than satirical, because it is written in such a straight, serious way. Satire needs its targets, but without a comprehending audience to "get it," it cannot exist.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing is one of those terms that gets defined for you very early in your academic career, often as early as middle school but certainly by the time you have reached 10th grade. The basic idea behind the term is easy to grasp, and the word is colorful and memorable, which makes it easy to identify; it is as if an event in the future is casting a shadow on the present, which is precisely what the term is used to describe. Knowing how to identify this device is an essential skill you cannot afford to be without.

Foreshadowing is the process by which an author drops portentous hints and clues early in a novel (or other prose narrative), which, if we notice them and read them carefully, will allow us to predict events in the future of the fictional world. It must be noted at this point that students tend to over-identify this device, and apply it far too broadly. For example, suppose I am reading a novel and come across a sentence which reads "Billy looked up at the mountain, and got ready to climb its dizzying heights." Now, this passage certainly allows me to make the prediction that Billy is going to climb the mountain, but to identify this as an example of foreshadowing would be absurd. If the text is obviously and directly telling you something, foreshadowing is not present. For foreshadowing to be present, there must be only a hint at what will come, a line or image that is easily missed, but which will have great significance when we look back on it from a point in time after the foreshadowed event takes place.

One of the best ways to find foreshadowing is through hindsight, and some of the best novels and films make foreshadowing dominant. Perhaps the greatest example of this in contemporary film is The Sixth Sense, where we are given clues throughout the entire move as to what the shocking ending will be; the clues are subtle on their own, but when they are presented together as they are at the end of the film, they paint a clear picture and cause us to exclaim "Of course! Why didn't we think of that?" Effective foreshadowing provides connections and continuity as well. When something happens which has not been foreshadowed at all, we often feel somewhat cheated, as if the author or director was too lazy to create a plot that followed from its own events. Large events that are not foreshadowed seem random and at times pointless, and while this can serve (when used in moderation) to create shocking and comic effects, if done too often you are left with a thoroughly unsatisfying work.

One of my favorite examples of foreshadowing occurs in the opening scenes of Hamlet (which you must read immediately if you have not already), where we are told very early on about Hamlet's father's ghost haunting the battlements of the castle. Hamlet and Horatio decide to camp out there one night to see if they can encounter it, and get immersed in a long discussion about life, the current situation in the castle, and so on. We as readers, as well as the characters themselves, get so wrapped up in this discussion that we are all surprised when the ghost actually does appear, event though we really should have expected nothing less. The reason this is effective is because of excellent timing, which is essential to good foreshadowing. If the foreshadowing occurs at a distance too far removed from the event it foreshadows, we forget about the hints we received, and the event seems random. If the foreshadowing occurs too close to the event, foreshadowing disappears, and it merely seems as if we were just told the event would happen. The best authors employ a medium distance, immersing us in interesting and distracting events, so that when the foreshadowed event comes, we quickly remember the instances of foreshadowing leading up to it, despite not having thought about them for some time.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Flashback and Flashforward

Although these terms sound most at home in film studies, they are nonetheless a very prominent and indispensable feature of literature, especially the novel. Many people feel that they know precisely what defines these terms, especially flashback, because it is so common across various media; however, knowing the precise range and specific manifestations of each of these terms in some detail will prove very useful in novelistic analysis.

Flashback has been made most obvious in films, and as the name suggests, it is often preceded by a flash of bright light (often overlapping a close shot of a character's face), indicating that we are entering the mind of an individual. This is a way to border the events which occur in the flashback from those of the dominant narrative, helping the audience to know that what they are presently being shown is in the past, and potentially in a completely different place. Another way into a flashback is through a dream, which is also conventionally bordered, this time by an unfocused shimmering region on the periphery of the screen. In the novel, since there is no opportunity to use a bright flash of light or other visual effects to clue the readers in to the device, authors sometimes employ obvious boundaries like a line of asterisks, or italics around the events taking place in the flashback. In both film and the novel, however, there are other far more subtle ways to indicate that a flashback is taking place, and at times flashbacks occur without any formal indication at all.

One excellent example of flashback before that name was even applied to the device occurs in Homer's Odyssey, where Odysseus, after arriving at the court of a helpful king, tells of his journeys up to that point in the story, going into great detail and making us at times forget that we are not in the present time of the actual story, but instead looking back on it. A very similar approach to the device is employed in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, as Marlow begins to tell a story within the main narration of the novel, and this comes to occupy almost the entire work, making us forget what we are reading isn't present time. Perhaps even more subtly, an author can present entire chapters of a novel as flashbacks, without ever informing us that these events take place in the past. This leaves it to us to reconcile the seemingly disparate chapters with the main action, and there is a definite sense of satisfaction which arises once this is achieved.

The flashforward is the flashback's younger, less popular sibling, and for good reason: since stories are told most often in the past tense, it makes sense to include other events from a more distant past in the recounting of a narrative. The tenses remain the same, and even more importantly, the events have already happened, so they can be reported. Flashforward, on the other hand, is far less natural because it must either be presented in the future tense, which is almost unheard of in narrative prose, or in the past tense from a perspective that is even further along in time than the events being narrated, which are already further ahead in time than the events of the main story. This is further complicated by the fact that future events do not exist in the same way past events do, and so flashforward most often needs to be centered on tricks like prognostication and time-travel. This device is most effectively employed in conjunction with flashback to create an uncertainty about the present time of a story, like in Tarantino's classic movie Pulp Fiction, which employs both devices so effectively that we are left thoroughly disoriented and unable to distinguish present from past and future, until the story progresses sufficiently to help us situate how the various episodes are intertwined.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Plot versus Story

In common usage these terms are interchangeable, and if someone asks you for the plot of a movie or the story of what happened to you last weekend, in both cases you will be recounting the events you saw or experienced as thoroughly and completely as possible. In this way, you will be recreating events in a way that is as true to their actual unfolding as possible, which will make what happened clear to your friend and simple to present for yourself. However, as you might have expected if you have been reading this series from the beginning, these terms take on distinct meanings when used to describe aspects of the novel, and should be used carefully by anyone performing a thorough and precise analysis (which should be you if you are looking for a solid grade on your next essay or presentation for English class).

Although scholars can characterize the terms somewhat differently in their specifics, I have found it most useful to define the terms plot and story as two related and interwoven layers of the same tapestry, each of which is absolutely necessary for the other to exist in any way. Beginning with story will be easiest, since that corresponds to the most simple and intuitive definition described in the first paragraph above. The story of a given novel includes all of the events that take place within it, in their full detail, in the order in which they occur chronologically. To take a well known classic example, the Odyssey is a story of a man who upon his return from the Trojan War gets captured by a cyclops, escapes through trickery, and then gets cursed by the god of the sea for taunting and injuring the cyclops with such arrogance. He wanders, doomed, for ten years, coming close but never able to reach his homeland, as one terrible incident after another befalls him and his crew. Finally, he reaches his home, kills those who have been trying to marry his wife and inherit his lands and titles, and flees with his family to escape the vengeance of the men's irate relatives. This is an outline of the story Homer presents, and although it possesses much greater detail than I have had space for here, this is the essence of what story is.

Plot, on the other hand, is a less natural, more artistic designation, and describes the selection and ordering of events from the story rather than the events themselves. Plot is concerned not so much with what happens, as with how those events are presented to the reader. In the above example of the Odyssey, we do not begin reading at the point where Odysseus is setting sail for home right after the Trojan War is concluded. Instead, the action begins at a point much further along in the action of the story, where Odysseus has been kept (half-willing) captive to a beautiful nymph. After continuing from this point for a short time, Odysseus eventually arrives at a welcoming kingdom and tells his whole story to his host, simultaneously filling us in on what has gone before. He eventually catches up to the point in the story where he began telling the tale, and thus the plot catches up with the story once again. This serves as a kind of flashback, which is a common device used in conjunction with in medias res to tell us what has gone on before. Also, it is important to keep in mind that the choice of which events to cover, and the time taken to describe each of them, is an important consideration of plot. An author's choice to include a given event increases its significance, and the time spent covering it does so even further. As a result, an event which might not seem greatly significant to the story as a whole may become the centre of the action based on how it is treated in the unfolding of the plot. In this way, plot can mould story to create a vast array of literary effects, and as any good historian will tell you, the same story can be told in many different ways, resulting in dozens or hundreds of variations on "the truth" of the original story.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

In Medias Res, Ab Ovo

Although the focus of this series is on the novel and its devices, it must be mentioned that the novel as we know it today, since it is a relatively young form (not much more then 300 years old), owes a great debt to those genres which precede it by hundreds or even thousands of years. One such genre, epic poetry, is one of the earliest and most direct ancestors of the novel, and as such many of the terms that we use in the analysis of the novel come from that rich and ancient tradition. The terms under discussion in this article, in medias res and ab ovo, derive from the Roman author Horace's Ars Poetica, written almost 2000 years ago and analyzing literature composed up to 800 years before that. Horace suggested that it is best to begin an epic in medias res, or "in the middle of things," as opposed to ab ovo, or "from the beginning" (literally "from the egg"). Novelists have found this epic convention appealing from the beginning of the form, and although while in medias res is very popular, ab ovo beginnings are nonetheless still very common as well.

The ab ovo opening of a novel is the most direct and intuitive way to begin a tale; after all, it makes sense to us to start a story at its beginning, follow it through its middle, and then conclude with its final events. Many of the common forms of narrative we use in everyday life, like simple accounts of how the day went, jokes, anecdotes, and descriptions of interesting events, use this method of straightforward presentation. Ab ovo cuts down on the potential for confusion, requires little planning, and is thus perfect for oral presentation as it does not tax the memory of the listener and the forethought of the teller too greatly. Many excellent novels unfold in this way, tending to develop gradually and build in a way consistent with Freytag's Pyramid, discussed in a previous article. The distinction between plot and story (to be covered in more depth in an upcoming article), or the artful ordering and selection of events versus the plain actual events and circumstances themselves, is least pronounced using this method, and a more naturalistic feel is achieved in the writing.

In contrast, in medias res involves opening a novel somewhere in the middle of the action, rather than at the beginning of the chain of events that unfolded to bring things to a given level of development. Picture for a moment a novel where the narrator begins with the lines "I awoke to the screams of thousands chanting and dancing around me, torches flaring high into the dark night and the stench of burning human flesh revolting my singed nostrils. I had a plan for escape, but it won't make sense until you know how all this came about." Here, we have no exposition or introduction to the protagonist/narrator, no idea how things have come to be the way they are, and no hint as to the general setting and circumstances. We have been thrust into a situation full of tense excitement and dread, and are as disoriented as the narrator is when he awakes to find himself in a desperate bind. This is the essence of in medias res, and the effects are impressive.

First, it provides an immediate hook for the reader; with such exciting events presented in the first lines, one will be highly tempted to continue, whereas some mundane exposition is less likely to captivate. Next, it creates great suspense from the outset; we are dying to know what happens, but we must wait until we know how things led to this point before it will be revealed. Finally, it allows us to immediately put ourselves in the place of the narrator; since we know nothing about him, we project our own characteristics onto the central figure, and feel his troubles as our own. As a result of these powerful initial effects, many fast-paced novels of adventure and action begin in this way, making in medias res a staple of most modern bestsellers.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Dialogue

Dialogue (or dialog, as many of you will most often see it) is a vital aspect of most novels, and while it is not an absolute necessity, one would be hard pressed to find a novel that contained absolutely none of it. The skillful use of dialogue can bring characters to life and animate an entire fictional world; used poorly, it can ruin a novel and destroy our willingness to believe in the fictional world and the events taking place within it.

It will not come as a surprise to most that dialogue is the presentation of direct speech as it is exchanged between two or more characters in a novel. As it stands for almost all written prose, the conventions surrounding dialogue in the novel are straightforward; the words are reported just as they are spoken, without paraphrase, in the voice of the person who uttered the remarks. Note that the reporting of indirect speech is not considered dialogue, as in the following example: "Billy told me that he wanted to eat more grapes, but I told him that there were no more grapes to be eaten." Here, the narrator is presenting a conversation between two people, but does so indirectly rather than directly. The narrator nests the words of the other participant in her own stream of dialogue, paraphrases what was said, and uses that to integrate the other's words into her own sentence. The most important consideration for determining when speech is direct or indirect is to ask yourself if you are hearing the voice of both people speaking for themselves in a verbal exchange or not. For the above to have been presented directly in the form of dialogue, Billy would have to be present, and he would have to use the word I when referring to himself. Since this is not the case, his words are being reported by another indirectly, and so this is not an example of dialogue.

There are several formatting conventions which govern the use of dialogue in a novel, and an example of dialogue done correctly is presented below:

Cindy was angry, and began railing at Billy mercilessly, screaming "I hate you Billy, I hate you and your stupid grapes more than anything!"

"But why?" asked Billy innocently, pretending not to know why she was reacting this way, "I only ate the grapes you told me I could."

"Liar!" cried Cindy, "Last night I told you specifically not to touch the last container of grapes, and you said 'Ok Cindy, I promise I won't eat those ones.'"

First, note that all direct speech is enclosed by double quotation marks, while the regular narration is not. This enclosure indicates that we are hearing the voices of the people directly, and that we are hearing their words as they speak them, without alteration. Within these quoted sections, the characters refer to themselves as I, and use their own speaking conventions which may differ from those of the narrator. Whenever the speaker of a line of dialogue changes, a new paragraph is required. Cindy speaks in paragraph one, while Billy speaks in two, and Cindy returns in three. This prevents the confusion that might otherwise arise, and it also allows the author to take some efficient shortcuts. Hemingway, for example, often presents many lines of dialogue in a row, each with its own paragraph, when he recounts a rapid exchange between two characters. This involves us more deeply in the speed and power of their conversation, but still remains comprehensible because we know who must be saying what in each line based on the paragraph-per-speaker convention. Finally, notice the single quotation marks in Cindy's final line. This is used to mark the presentation of direct speech within someone else's direct speech, again clarifying who is saying what and in what way. These conventions adhere throughout North American English, though if you find yourself using British English or a variant based on it, consult an appropriate style manual to ensure you understand its subtle but important differences in dialogue presentation.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Genre

For those of you unfamiliar with the French language (from which we English speakers have inherited the word), genre refers to a kind or type of something, which is a good starting definition of the word as we will be using it here. It originates from the Latin genus, meaning virtually the same thing, and appears as the root of such English words as gender and generic. In its use as a literary term, genre refers to a type of writing, and can be employed on a variety of levels from the most general to the highly specific. Most works (and not just novels, either) have a readily identifiable genre, and it can be argued the all works can be placed in the broadest conceptions of genre.

Looking at the widest definition first, genre is used to distinguish various kinds or art from each other, leaving us with categories like the visual arts (painting), the plastic arts (sculpture), the musical arts, and the literary arts. Since our focus is on the last of these, we can see how this most basic designation of genre can be further defined; within the literary arts we have many different forms of expression, the three most essential of which are poetry, drama, and prose. Subdividing the last of these, we get (among others) the essay, the short story, and the novel, which brings us at last to the focus of our considerations in this series.

As is plain to see from above, genre can be determined based on form; all of the above classifications are definably distinct from the others, and each element in a given category is formally different from those which occupy a place on the same level. However, genre is definable not only in terms of form, but also in terms of content, and these distinctions do not always create mutually exclusive categories. For example, one well known genre is religious praise. Now, if you ask yourself which of the above categories best suits it, you might be hard pressed to nail down any one of them. All of the arts have provided suitable homes from this kind of expression, and all of the subclasses of these arts do as well, meaning that the this genre is not limited by formal considerations. However, there are certain forms within each artistic type that often accompany such works in the genre of religious praise, and these are known as genre-specific conventions.

Looking to the novel, we can see that genre is a major consideration, and many readers confine their reading to one or two favorite genres. You likely have a friend or family member who loves romances and westerns (which are, surprisingly, very similar in major respects), and another who will read only science fiction and fantasy. Other perennial favorites include the spy novel, the thriller, the mystery or detective novel, the horror novel, and the courtroom drama. The components of these genres include first and foremost a concern for a specific kind of experience and/or setting; after all, you can't have a western without the Wild West, and you can't have a romance without, well, romance! These basic requirements are accompanied by several generic conventions, and while few novels will have the whole range of conventions common for a given genre, almost all will have a critical mass of them which makes the work readily definable. For each genre, there are several common plot archetypes that dominate, and while the names and characters change, the basic structure of the novels is remarkably consistent. When writing about a novel, make sure to present the genres and subgenres it occupies, and don't forget that combining related genres like the thriller and the spy novel is a common occurrence. This will situate the novel for your readers, and prepare them to expect how the novel (and your essay) will unfold.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Diction and Style

Although the word diction is seldom used today, and is most often used to describe the correctness of someone's speech when it is (using proper diction), it still serves as a useful descriptor in literary, especially novelistic, analysis. The root of the word originates in the Latin dictus, meaning saying or speaking, and is present in other English words like dictionary and dictation. Diction is thus the manner in which an author chooses to say something, often governed by or determining of a general style, best explored through word choice and word order.

Although this definition might sound complex, you will no doubt have a good idea of the kind of diction, as well as the resultant style, that emerges from the following passage:

Ron Smith Jones was exceedingly intelligent and highly educated. His primary interest was science, and literary fiction held no interest for him. However, he enjoyed factually accurate and concise historical accounts. He calculated his emergence from the womb at precisely 351 436 hours previous to the present moment, and predicted he had a 77% chance of doubling this number before his body ceased to function. Ron Smith Jones was precise.

As we discussed in a previous article regarding tone, the first step in determining the diction of a given passage is highly intuitive. The impressions you likely received describing the word choice in this passage are short, choppy, scientific, bare, technical, and dull. Writers will often employ diction in a consistent way over the course of a particular passage to reflect its content, and it is no coincidence that all of the words used to describe the diction of the passage can also be applied to the man they describe. When diction is applied in a systematic way to create a given impression and a consistent way of expressing an idea, we are left with a particular style, which in this case could be described as scientific or journalistic, plain and possessing little figurative language or other adornments.

Looking closely at the passage, we can find the specific word choices and structures that create this stylistic effect. First, the complete name of the character is given on two occasions, and he is never called by a more familiar name. This indicates an accuracy and formality that is out of place in most instances, but which fits the rest of the passage well. The sentences are quite short, and ideas are kept strictly apart by the use of periods rather than more complex conjunctions. We can see the words intelligent, educated, science, accurate, concise, and historical all in the first three sentences, working together to make a thoroughly academic impression. When literature is spoken of at all (negatively, of course), it is given the more technical term literary fiction, rather than the less formal terms fiction, literature, or even novels or stories. Going further, the narrator describes the birth of Ron Smith Jones as his "emergence from the womb," which is accurate but highly formal, and the calculation of his age in hours rather than years shoes a real concern for detail. The same applies to his estimated lifespan percentage, and to his reference to death as ceasing to function. The last sentence is very brief and factual, perfectly suited to the character of the man in question.

It is important to keep in mind that evaluations of diction and style rely on a single fact; there are many ways to relate a given point to an audience, and the way an author chooses to do this is a conscious decision intended to have a specific effect. Consider the way the above passage was constructed, and how many changes could have been made to different words, as well as to given syntactical structures, which would have preserved the meaning of the passage but completely altered its flavor. This is the essence of diction and style, and no good literary evaluation is complete with them.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Mood, Atmosphere, or Tone

Although some academics make distinctions between these three terms, they are widely considered interchangeable, and whichever one you use will be comprehensible to your teachers or professors; as a result, if for some reason you are making a distinction between them in a paper or report, make sure you explain what this distinction is, because it will not be obvious to any of your readers. Also, as is the case for all of the terms in this series and the previous ones, make sure you know and follow the definitions and distinctions provided by your instructors when they do so. Knowing is useful, but knowing something according to the way you will be tested on it is even more so.

Mood, atmosphere, and tone (known as MAT from this point forward) are words used to describe the evocative elements of a literary work which prompt (or are at least supposed to prompt) a general feeling in the reader. After reading the following passage, see if you are able to identify the dominant mood the author is striving to produce:

A dripping passageway followed me down through the utter darkness, into the bowels of the abandoned dungeon. Distorted echoes emanated from every surface, seeping through cracks in the ancient pipes overhead where sightless carnivores slowly breathed the blood of their next victim. An oppressive chill momentarily paralyzed my shivering legs, and I thank God what came next was driven from memory by the thick sewage that swept me into oblivion.

The first step in detecting the mood is a highly intuitive one; merely ask yourself how you feel after reading a given passage. Picture yourself there, in the place described or, even better, in the place of the character who appears there. In the example above, the MAT might be described as dark, dank, damp, disgusting, lonely, hopeless, despairing, powerless, empty, cold, fearful, and sinking, or some combination of these. It is important to note that determining MAT is not a precise science, so use whatever terms you feel most strongly and accurately convey the feeling of the passage.

After reading through the passage in question and determining the general mood, it is important to revisit specific aspects of the passage to discover (and to show to others) why it is that the passage feels that way, and why it would likely feel the same way to almost anyone. In this case, the most telling features are the things found in the place and the words used to describe them, like dripping passageway, utter darkness, bowels, abandoned dungeon, and many others. All of these work together to signify a scary place you would not want to visit, and the depth and enclosure of the place reinforces this feeling.

Note how the description plays with different sensory modalities, dealing with vision (darkness), hearing (echoes), scent (breathed the blood), and touch (paralyzed); the senses are a key pathway into feelings, and are indispensable in creating tone. Finally, look at how the reversal of agency influences the MAT of the passage on a more conceptual level. The narrator is followed by the passage, rather than the other way around, and he tells us the chill paralyzes his legs, rather than saying his legs are paralyzed by the chill. This gives the power of action to the underground location, and strips it from the character. Also, giving the setting agency serves to make it resemble a living thing, and this is further emphasized by the reference to its having bowels, and the sounds it makes independent of other living things.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Theme

These is one of those key concepts that you can not fail to avoid as you are making your way through the educational system, and most of us have it defined for us early in our teen years or before. Despite this fact, many of us have a difficult time coming up with the theme or themes of a given novel or story, and I believe this has to do with a basic misunderstanding of what the term means based on simplistic definitions.

In its simplest manifestation, a theme of a story can be equated with its "lesson" "moral," or "take-home message." For example, in a novel based on the actions of a gang leader who gets shot and dies by the end, the moral might be "don't join a gang" or "don't use drugs," or more positively, "stay in school." All of these can be seen as themes, but novels are such complex entities that before you state a moral as the overarching theme of a work, make sure you have investigated other possibilities as well.

A theme is more than the potential message of a work, and a moral needn't even be present in order for a theme to be. In fact, while every novel I have ever read contains at least one, but most often several, themes, very few novels (especially modern ones) have an identifiable moral. So, while lessons and morals can serve as themes, they do not completely define the range of options that a theme can occupy.

A theme is a basic idea that underlies a novel and serves as a guide to its progression; the most effective novels will present and intertwine several themes, and every page will work towards forwarding one or more of these themes and their interactions. This is a broad definition, but theme needs to be broadly defined because it can range from the very general to the specific. One often used and well known example of a theme is love. The theme of love is one that runs through the entirety of literature's history, and you will be hard pressed to find a narrative work produced in the 20th century which doesn't include love among its themes. Now, love is about as general as a theme gets, and often novelists will use more specific varieties of love in creating a more focused work. Unrequited love, where love is completely one-sided, is a common theme, as is adulterous love, other kinds of forbidden love, and the game of love, where characters engage in complex interactions and manipulations in their pursuit of each other.

Taking a cue from the example of love above, my recommendation for finding and analyzing themes in a given novel is to begin with the broadest categories possible, and examine them till you discover narrower and narrower themes. For example, one of the dominant themes in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is European colonizing. Looking more specifically, we find that the novel deals with the problems and limitations of colonialization. Going even deeper, we see that the problems of colonizing result in a strict division between natives and Europeans, which turns our attention to the problems of a dehumanizing racism which haunts the colonizing project and renders the natives effectively inhuman. One you have a preliminary thematic hierarchy, you can find specific examples of events which take place on each level, and then examine each event to see if it reveals a separate series of themes. In this way, you will come up with the interrelations between different thematic threads in the novel, and your analysis will move far beyond the simple location of morals and lessons.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Conflict

It has often been said that with no conflict, there would be no novel, and I couldn't agree more wholeheartedly. Imagine opening a book and reading 300 pages where all goes smoothly and no complications arise for any of the characters. What you would have is a boring recounting of the mundane events of the lives of several people you do not know, and while this might be a useful sleeping aid, it would make for terrible reading.

Conflict is a term most of us understand without need of a formal definition, but to formalize it somewhat for this article, I would define it as the clashing of opposing powers, at least one of which attempts to limit of nullify the other. This is intentionally general, and I believe it has to be, since conflict can occur on so many levels, and around so many different kinds of struggles. In fiction, the four main kinds of conflict are character versus character, character versus nature, character versus self, and character versus society. Most of these are not mutually exclusive categories, and even the term character must be redefined for certain novels where the characters are not even people, but animals, aliens, or robots. However, with these four types in mind, an examination of the various conflicts that power a given novel will be possible.

Character versus character is the most obvious sort of conflict, and we see this in almost every novel that has been printed. There are many degrees of conflict within most novels, ranging from the primary conflict that overarches the entire story to nearly insignificant ones that have no real effect. When a character versus character conflict is at the heart of a story, we often have a protagonist (or hero) pitted against an antagonist (or villain), with the story's outcome resting on the result of a battle between them. The original Star Wars movies and novels are a good example of this, as Luke Skywalker must resolve the conflict with his father Darth Vader in order to be successful.

Character versus nature is less common, and most stories with this conflict in the center also contain other types of conflict as well, as it is difficult to sustain a novel over a sufficient period if one of the major antagonists is not even aware of what it is doing. One notable exception might be Hemingway's classic The Old Man and the Sea, where an ageing fisherman battles the elements and a great marlin for days, finally succeeding in bringing it to shore but at the cost of his life. Moby Dick is another well known example, where the embittered captain relentlessly hunts the whale that took his leg. Stories of survival are also centered on this kind of conflict, since the protagonist must battle natural forces (storms, heat, cold, thirst) in order to achieve her goals (most notably, survival).

Character versus self is most obviously portrayed in films featuring psychotic characters who must battle a rogue personality or the voices in their head in order to be successful. More subtle versions of this kind of conflict occur when a character must face a fear, break an addiction, fight a habit, or simply make a difficult choice. This is often emblemized in cartoons by a devil sitting on one shoulder and an angel sitting on the other, and while this is certainly not necessary for this type of conflict to occur, the idea is the same.

Finally, we have character versus society, which can in some ways be seen as a combination of some of the others. First, since society is composed of people, the character is in conflict with individuals. Also, since many people functioning together toward a single goal with similar aims begins to resemble a natural force, like in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, this conflict type also resembles that of character versus nature. Almost any time a character is fighting for what is right in the face of oppression, we have a case of character versus society. Movies dealing with racism, sexism, battling large corporations, and the like, all fall under this category.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Setting

If you have managed to emerge from university with no idea what the term setting means with regard to literature and film, it is obvious that you have created a duplicate of yourself to attend class since at least middle school. Setting is one of the first and most important terms that gets taught in public schools, and without it, any analysis of a novel will be noticeably incomplete. Some aspects of the term are intuitive, and can be easily derived from the common uses of the term in everyday life. Some, however, are specific to literary analysis, and so must be memorized in the definition of the term.

If something is set somewhere, it is indicated that it has been placed there, that it occupies the place where it was put. Most obviously then, the term setting describes in what place a story occurs. This place can be considered in as specific or as general a way as you like, depending on what will have the most relevance for an analysis of the story at hand. For example, telling me that a novel is set in Mongolia will immediately inform me, a Western reader, that I am in for a lesson in a culture and geography with which I am unfamiliar. Novels can stretch across many distant places, and it is not uncommon in the modern spy thriller for a novel to be set in many locations around the globe. Of course, perhaps the larger geographical location is never mentioned, so that I do not know what country, or even what hemisphere the story unfolds in. In this case, sometimes the scale of the story is smaller, and so I can describe the story as being set in three primary locations: the mall, Billy's house, and the graveyard. This becomes relevant when the action is confined to a very limited space, and even if I knew where all of these places were more generally, it might be useful to describe the setting in these more specific terms as well, especially if large parts of the story take place in each, and each contributes to the general structure of the novel.

Thinking about place again, although this time more metaphorically, we can see that events and people also occupy a certain place in time, and so setting also involves the time in which a story is set. As for geographical place, the time of a story can range from the very limited (minutes or even seconds), to entire lifetimes and beyond. Most novels, however, are bound to a particular era or period, and the 1920s, the early 80s, medieval times, and so on, are common time aspects of setting. Again, the time in which the story is set serves to create a certain mood and feel, as well as reader expectations. The time, like the place, can be shown to us directly through on-screen or chapter-leading captions or through the comments of a character, or indirectly through objects and behaviors associated with that period; this second method is far more subtle, and if it is done correctly, realizing when and where something is happening can be exciting.

The final aspect of setting is not as intuitive, but it is no less important than the other two, and can often be deduced from them. The circumstances surrounding the events of a story go hand-in-hand with the time and place to create a certain mood and feel in the mind of the reader, and certain times and places strongly suggest certain circumstances, just as certain circumstances can immediately clue you in to the time and place. For example, if I know a story is set in Berlin in 1942, I will immediately know the circumstances of the film will be closely tied to the Second World War. Similarly, if I see soldiers marching with swastikas on their arms, I will know that the film is set in wartime Europe. You can use any of the three elements of time, place, and circumstances to deduce the missing elements, and doing so will greatly enhance your experience of a given novel.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Levels of Narration

Although the ideas presented in the articles on point of view seem easy enough to grasp, there are many places where the generally solid conceptual scheme looks a little thin. For example, suppose I have a narrator who is not a key part of the story as it unfolds, and who did not witness the story, but who is reporting it to us from some point after it as a relative of one of the characters, and who perhaps even made an appearance in the story as a baby? Fiction being fiction, there is an enormous range of possibility, and distinguishing between different points of view can be difficult. In the case above, do we have a third-person narrator, since she is removed in time from the events, or is she a first-person narrator, since she refers to herself as I throughout the telling, and did technically take part in the tale? In such borderline cases, a more advanced terminology becomes useful, and it allows us to say that, in this case, we are certainly dealing with a homodiegetic narrator.

This might sound daunting, but the diegetic levels of narration, as introduced by Genette and adopted (as well as adapted) by many, serve as a finer tool for the dissection of narrative perspectives. The base term, diegesis, refers broadly to the world of the story, as well as the telling of events in that world (the narrative), and the characters that exist there. The protagonist is always part of the diegesis, for example, and the publisher of the novel is not.

Applying this to the level of narration, and using it to further define narrative point of view, we begin with the primary distinction between the entities of the story world and those which exist outside it. The former are referred to as homodiegetic, while the latter are heterodiegetic; the prefixes are excellent clues which will allow you to keep these straight in your mind, as homo suggests sameness, while hetero suggests difference. So, any narrator who is a part of the story world, whose existence fits into the world in which the story takes place, is known as a homodiegetic narrator; if the narrator could in some way interact with the characters and events he or she is describing, the narrator is homodiegetic. So, in the above example, since the narrator is telling the story from the perspective of an individual who lives in the world of the story, that narrator is properly termed homodiegetic. The vast majority of narrators who use I to describe themselves are homodiegetic, and this is a good (but not foolproof) test. I suppose you could have a narrator who uses I without being part of the story world, but this would be a rare and specialized case indeed, and would have to be presented in a manner similar to the following: "I am now going to tell you a story about an imaginary, far-away land, so prepare to be thrilled!" The rest of the story would unfold in the third-person, and the inclusion of sections where I is used would be considered instances of obtrusive narration. The narrator is, however, still clearly not part of the word described, and unless there is also a story going on around the narrator him or herself as well (which we will discuss later in this article), he or she is heterodiegetic.

As you might have guessed, a heterodiegetic narrator is one who is not a part of the story world. This covers most third-person narrators, and is most easily applicable to the authoritative, omniscient brand of this narration. When the narrator has no definable identity and does not include any references to self, that narrator is considered heterodiegetic. To test which of the two basic diegetic types a given narrator is, you merely have to ask yourself whether that agent could interact with the world of the story being described. If yes, you have homodiegetic; if no, heterodiegetic.

Within the category of homodiegetic narration are some important distinctions that further define the position of the narrator in relation to the world of which he or she is a part. One of the most useful of these terms is the autodiegetic narrator, which is one of the most common narrating types in literature. The autodiegetic narrator is not only a part of the story in which she resides, but is also the protagonist, the most important or the main character in the novel. This kind of narrator is always positioned in the first-person, and it is very difficult to imagine an autodiegetic narrator who employed the third-person, barring a strange science-fiction or fantasy scenario or an equally bizarre psychological disorder which causes the person to refer to themselves as he or she.

A further distinction in the agent of narration can be found in cases where a subsidiary story is being told within the main story. This is a fairly common device in literature of all types, and is especially common in the novel. Every story must have some teller (one of the basic tenets of narrative theory), and so the narrator of the story within the story is called the intradiegetic narrator. The prefix intra, meaning within, is an obvious indication of the term's meaning, and is an easy way to distinguish this from the other terms we have discussed so far. Intradiegetic narrators are almost always characters in the novels in which they appear, and their stories are usually bordered by quotation marks. It is possible, however, that the primary narrator, who also happened to be the protagonist, could decide to report a story she is telling within the main story; this would also likely be in quotation marks, and it would make the character a homodiegetic, autodiegetic, intradiegetic narrator all at the same time!

To clarify all of these terms, some concrete examples from actual and popular novels might be helpful. An obvious heterodiegetic narrator can be found in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, where the narrating voice is formal, descriptive, omniscient, and completely impersonal. We never get any indication that this narrator is a person at all, and we certainly don't get the impression that he is a part of the world he describes. Another fine example is the narrator of the Harry Potter series, who, although she often follows the perspective of Harry and his friends closely, is never identified with a member of the fictional world.

An example of a homodiegetic narrator would be Lockwood in Wuthering Heights, who, although he plays no major part in the events he relates, tells the tale of the doomed lovers he encounters, both as he has observed it and as it has been told to him through others closer to the action and the individuals involved. Autodiegetic narration can be seen in the famous (and infamous) novel Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. The main character, Holden, is a troubled youth who speaks to us directly in his own idiolect, using the same slang and patterns of thought that we might expect from any youth of his time period. He is the protagonist of his novel, and while he really isn't a hero, he is nonetheless the center of his own story.

Finally, we can see intradiegetic narration in Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness. The primary narrator, who is never named, is homodiegetic, and the world of his story is a ship on its way back to England. He talks to several people in a small group during this trip, and once a man named Marlow is allowed to tell a story, this continues for almost the entire novel, so that we often forget that the primary narrator is even there. Because he tells his story within the story of the primary narrator, Marlow's narration is intradiegetic, making him an (unorthodox) intradiegetic narrator.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Point of View

Although I prefer the somewhat more complex though far more thorough and descriptive narrative categories described by the term diegetic level, point of view is a good introduction to the same idea, and is an absolute staple of high school and college English classrooms. We must be careful not to confuse the literary idea point of view with the everyday definition we have of the term. We often use point of view to describe our beliefs and opinions in general, or on a given matter, as in the sentence "From my point of view, the war in Iraq is unjustifiable." We can use this the same way in literature, especially if we are describing the opinions of a given character, but as a technical literary term about the working of a novel itself, it has a more specific application.

The point of view of a novel is a description of how the author has positioned the storytelling agent, and what powers this agent has been given. It is important to remember that, from the perspective of literary studies, a novel is related to the reader not through the author directly, but rather through what is known as the narrator. If you claim in a college essay that the author states something, and then quote from the novel, your professor is very likely to scratch out author and put narrator in its place. Some scholars believe that contact with the author does not have to be seen as always completely mediated through a narrator, but the dominant school suggests that it does.

So, every novel has a narrator, and the first term used to describe this entity is a grammatical one, having to do with the person telling the tale. Grammatical person can be either first-person, second-person, or third-person, and all of these can be either singular or plural. Put most simply, first person singular is an I narrator, plural we; second person you, plural you; third person he, she, or it, plural they. In terms of the novel, the most common person for narration is the third, followed closely by first, and quite distantly by second. Because almost all novels are told by a single being, the singular forms are dominant to the point where the plural would be considered puzzling. After all, when is the last time you read a novel where the narrator referred to themselves as we throughout?

Each of these points of view has properties which make it distinct from the others, and which creates given effects on the novel and its reception. Beginning with the third-person, we can see that this is the most objective point of view. The narrator here is usually a disembodied force which is completely outside the action of the story and even the world of the story. These narrators usually attempt to make themselves as unobtrusive as possible, and exist only as devices through which the story is presented. They can be omniscient, which means that they have unlimited knowledge about the world of the story, as well as the ability to reveal the thoughts and feelings of any character they like, jumping in and out of different heads at will. Alternatively, a third-person narrator may be limited, meaning that although the narrator is not in the story (I is not used in the narration), the information we receive emanates primarily from the thoughts and experiences of a single character or a small group of characters. Any information we get is information that would also be available to this character or group, and although the narrator is free to range outside this perspective (and such mixes of omniscience with a limited perspective are not uncommon), she remains for the most part within it.

The effect created through the use of third-person narration varies widely, depending on the level of omniscience of the narrator and the goals of the author. This flexibility is one of the reasons why so many authors choose and have chosen this point of view, and why the first-person, while popular, has not been able to surpass it. The third-person can be combined with total omniscience and very formal diction to create a work that is very serious, even solemn and religious in tone. Because this narrator is virtually without personality or defining characteristics, pronouncements come from it (its gender is usually indefinable as well) as fact, as objective descriptions of the story world. The third-person limited point of view allows the author to bring the reader closer to a given character, and this is often accompanied by a less formal tone, as well as the liberal use of free indirect discourse (a device that we will be exploring in a future article). The author can vary these elements to create a more or less formal tone, and can employ it skillfully to selectively limit the information we receive, setting up opportunities for suspense and surprise.

The first-person narrator is the next most popular choice, and this point of view is always limited to some extent. Although the first-person narrator is always a member of the story world, he or she can be more or less integral to the unfolding action; first-person narrators can be protagonists, or they can be observers distant from the tales they are telling. Although we will get into the finer gradations in a future article, the most common type of first-person narrator is as the center of their own tale, and the audience is able to feel a closeness to this narrator that is far more difficult to achieve in third-person narration. It is as if you are being told a tale by someone you know (after all, who else would talk to you for several straight hours without interruption?), and you are very likely to identify with this narrator since you are being given the details of the world through their consciousness and through their filters. It is also possible for such a narrator to be self-serving and obviously biased in their telling of events, and unreliable narrators (covered in a previous article) are most likely to come from this type.

The final option for narrative person is the second-person, but this has not developed a following to any significant degree. Here, the narrator uses you as the narrating perspective, but for obvious reasons, this is more difficult to sustain over a long period of time. After all, you know that you are not the source of this story you are reading, and thus the effect can be somewhat puzzling. It can be used in a more limited fashion, as it is through brief sections of Timothy Findlay's The Wars, and it is a mainstay of role-playing game-books, where the reader makes choices which determine how the story will unfold. When it works, the use of this point of view draws the reader in completely, insisting on immersion in the action of the story, as well as encouraging significant identification.

Note that tense is another aspect of point of view that can change the flavor of the way a story is told. The most common is the past tense, and this makes sense since it seems most natural to tell a story after the story has occurred. The use of the present tense is uncommon, but it does appear in the novel, and it is standard in the rare cases of second-person narration. It is frequently employed in dream sequences or other imaginative recreations within the main narrative point of view, and it adds a sense of immediacy and unpredictability that can be effective, again in small doses. The future tense, while possible, has to my knowledge been limited to experimental fiction, and you are unlikely to encounter it in a narrative point of view.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Character Depth and Evolution

As we saw in the last article, there are many ways through which we get to know what characters are like and how they change over time. This allows us to grant them general (or sometimes specific) personalities, based on the detail of the information we have collected, and our evaluation of its authenticity. Aside from making specific personality evaluations about characters, our analyses allow us to label the characters more generally, based on how well fleshed out they are, and how much they change throughout the course of a novel. I refer to these categories as character depth and character evolution, and while I have not heard these categories labeled as such before, the more specific terms they contain are well known in high school and college literary studies classes.

Character depth can be evaluated on a continuum that runs between two poles, those being fully rounded (or three-dimensional) and completely flat (or two-dimensional). As an example of the latter, suppose I have a character in my novel whom we see only three or four times, and then only briefly. This character is a postal worker, and we only ever see her when the main character goes to the post office to pick up his mail. The postal worker only ever talks about the weather and the mail, and although she gives the protagonist an important package, she could be safely dropped from the novel without much disruption. She would certainly be classified as a two-dimensional character, one who does not have a developed personality, and who serves as a plot device or an optional accoutrement to the main action. Compare this to people we hardly know is our real lives; we imagine they have fully developed personalities, interests, and complexities beneath the visible surface, but we never get to see them because our acquaintance is only casual and superficial.

The other end of the continuum is occupied by the round character, an example of which would be the protagonist of most novels. These characters are known to us first perhaps as two-dimensional characters, as we see them going about their chosen trade and interacting with people in the expected superficial ways. However, as the story progresses, we get to know these characters on multiple levels that reach far below the surface. We get to spend a lot of time with them and so begin to learn their wishes, fears, desires, friends, and the many complications that form their seemingly simple lives. We feel as though we understand these characters, and we usually become invested in their individual struggles, empathizing extensively. It is also common for us to be presented the novel from the point of view of a given character, and when this is the case, that character is very likely to be three-dimensional.

The depth of characters can, to some degree, be related to their potential for evolution in the novel, though this is certainly not a rule to chisel in stone. A two-dimensional character is not likely to change much from the beginning to the end of a story. This character is thus a static character, remaining in a stable and utterly predictable consciousness throughout the novel. A three-dimensional character is far more likely to change as the novel progresses, and would thus be known as a dynamic character, one whose experiences and revelations lead to a greater understanding of themselves and the world around them. A good way to judge character evolution is to ask yourself whether the character in question would make the same decision at the end of the novel as she did earlier in it. If the answer is no, the character is dynamic. If yes, the character is static. Remember that rounded characters can be static, and flat characters can be dynamic, though these pairings are less likely than their opposites.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Characterization

Because characters are such an important part of the novel, without which it would simply cease to be, much critical attention has been paid to how we come to know characters through the course of a work or over several works in which they appear. Just as actual people are not immutably mired in a stagnant world and forced to continually think and behave in precisely the same ways, neither are fictional characters forced to suffer like this. Characters develop just as our understanding of them develops, and the process through which this achieved is known as characterization.

There are many ways we can learn about a given character, each of which has a different level of authority and reliability. The result is that, over the course of a novel, we are given many small pieces of information about important characters, and it is through the intermingling of these small pieces that we are able to form an impression about the character as a whole. This is similar to the way we come to form impressions about actual people, once the obvious differences in duration and relative simplicity are taken into account.

The most obvious way we have of learning about a fictional character is through the direct comment or description of the narrator. If the narrator tells us that Bob has brown hair, we can (usually) rest assured that Bob has brown hair. If the narrator is an anonymous, omniscient being who is outside the story, her pronouncements on characters can be taken as correct. The closer the narrator is to the action of the story, the less authoritative her assertions are. So, a narrator who is also the protagonist of a novel can be relied upon to give an impression of herself which is more flattering than the impression others might give. Taken to an extreme, as it is in some notable novels like Conrad's Lord Jim and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, the narrator can have such an obvious agenda, mental illness, or simple proclivity for lying that their statements about others almost serve to prove the opposite of what they claim; when this is the case, the narrating agent is known as an unreliable narrator, and nothing this person says can be taken as true without careful examination.

The narrator who is close to the action functions similarly to the second way we have of gleaning information on a given character, which is through the comments of other (non-narrating) characters. As in real life, these characters have motivations and perspectives which will cause them to treat and describe others in more and less fair manners. Generally, the less personal interest a character has in another, the more unbiased their descriptions will be. However, little interest might also indicate little acquaintance, meaning that the character's qualifications to judge the other are limited.

The last of the basic ways we have of learning about a given character comes through the character herself, both in what she says about herself (and what she says in general of course: we learn a lot about people through all the comments they make) and in how she behaves. In comparison to actual people again, characters reveal themselves both accidentally and intentionally in their words and actions, and we sometimes have to watch closely to discern the natural self of the character from the artificial self portrayed to the public. It is important to remember that it is not through one source, but through many, that we get to know both real people and fictional characters, and that we must weigh all of our sources carefully against each other before coming to conclusions. As a general rule, we will believe the words of the narrator and/or the first characters we hear speaking about another, but as the novel progresses, this original information and our preliminary conclusions must be constantly reconsidered. This often results in our having a completely different opinion of a character by the end of a novel, not because he or she has changed significantly, but because we have come to a more complete understanding of their personalities and motivations.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Character Roles

Although many consider plot the most important aspect of any story, it can be argued that character is a contender for this coveted place as the most important aspect of the novel. Aristotle believed that character development occurred as the result of the unfolding of the interwoven plot, but it is possible to reverse this scenario, and see plot as unfolding as the result of the interactions of various characters. Just as it is impossible to have a story without a plot, so too is it impossible to have a story without any characters, and while they do not have to be human beings, or even intelligent entities, there must be subjective loci around which the events of the story can be structured. The alternative would constitute descriptions of landscapes, and these would not a novel make.

Three character terms that are most widely employed in the study of the novel are protagonist, antagonist, and foil, all of which are usually present in some form in a given novel. It should be noted that each of these character roles, while most often applied to single characters, are also frequently broadened to include groups of people or even larger entities like corporations or nations. Despite this flexibility, the role described by a given term is generally consistent and definable in any given novel, and locating the specific character or characters who occupy these roles is a good way to begin the analysis of any novel.

Protagonist is the oldest and most important of the trio of terms listed above, and it is also the most essential; it is possible to have a story without an antagonist (though some would dispute this), and a foil is also not necessary (despite being very common). However, a story without some kind of protagonist is really not fathomable. The protagonist, from early Greek theater to the present day, is the most important figure of a story, the one around whom the action of the story revolves. He protagonist is often simply referred to as the main character, and it is his or her quests, goals, and experiences that comprise the action of the story, and which we follow as we read the novel. It is important to note that the protagonist is not necessarily the narrator of the story; the character who tells the story is usually the protagonist, but this is certainly not always the case, as we will explore in a future article on point of view and levels of narration. Most simply, the protagonist is often known as the "good guy," and while this is too simplistic, it conveys the right idea, especially in a certain popular genre of action novels and films.

As you might expect, the antagonist of a novel is the character or group who most strongly opposes the goals of the protagonist, and who attempts to prevent his or her success in every way possible. It is often, though certainly not always, the case that the antagonist's goal is the destruction of the protagonist, and the reverse is also often true as well, where the destruction of the antagonist is the protagonist's primary objective. In the novels where we are presented with a hero and a villain, the villain is inevitably the antagonist, also known as the "bad guy," though again it must be stated that this is often far too simplistic a description.

Finally, we come to the foil, an optional character role in the novel but one which we see very often. The foil is a secondary character, neither protagonist nor antagonist, but one which can operate on the side of either, or one which takes no side at all. This character resembles the protagonist in a broad way, sharing very general characteristics with him or her, such as age, social status, and life circumstances. Despite these similarities, the foil is very different from the protagonist, especially with regard to personality and behavior. As a result, certain personality traits of the protagonist are highlighted through contrast, and this is precisely what the foil is designed to do.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Plot - Part I

There is perhaps nothing more central to a story of any kind than its plot, and Aristotle did not hesitate to describe this as the most important aspect of a narrative, making all other aspects, including characterization, subservient to it. He described plot as a series of interconnected events, and although scholars have since refined and elaborated on this basic formulation, it remains the core definition still used in high school and university classrooms. For Aristotle, a plot needed to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and while this seems so elementary this it appears unhelpful, it is not so obvious as it may seem. For example, take a series of events presented side-by-side that are not interconnected and which are completely self-contained. In this instance, there is no continuity, and so the idea of beginning, middle, and end is inapplicable. There is merely a series of discreet events, and no plot whatsoever, meaning you do not have a story in front of you, and that what you are reading is also not a novel.

Taking Aristotle's idea of interconnected events with a beginning middle and end much further, most teachers and professors turn to a structure called Freytag's pyramid (even thought they may not call it that) to describe the elements of a typical plot. The first of these elements is known as exposition, in which the important details of the story are set up. We learn about characters, their relationships with each other, where and when the story is located, what conflicts are present in the current situation between various groups and individuals, and so on. In this phase, the fictional world as it normally exists is presented to the reader; this can hold our attention for a time, but once we see that this is the usual way of life there, we become as bored with it as we would our own day-to-day lives, and so the normal must give way to something out of the ordinary.

This is where what is known as the inciting incident comes in. After we see how the world functions normally, an event occurs which creates or exacerbates some conflict and makes a significant change to the story world as we have come to know it. It takes the novel from the mundane to the interesting, and the rest of the novel unfolds as a result of this event. If this event did not occur, we would not have a novel, but only a series of boring events taking place in a given area to certain people. The inciting incident leads to a rise in the dramatic tension of the novel, and here is where the plot really starts to pick up speed. We are introduced to new characters, and we begin to see how the protagonist (the main character) is going to try to achieve what she has set out to do, and how others are going to try to prevent this from happening. This is known as the rising action, and it usually takes up a significant portion of any novel. This is where the story is the most wide-open to the inclusion of new characters and information, and so it sets the groundwork for what will happen in the future.

The rising action ends at the occurrence of the climax, which is the point of the novel where things turn around for the protagonist, and her fortunes are changed for better or worse. This usually takes very, very little time to occur, and can be as brief as a single paragraph or sentence in a large novel. It is the point the novel has been building toward, and where the suspense has been leading us. From here, we enter the falling action, which is where the protagonist either succeeds or fails; if there is a final encounter between opposing forces, this is where it takes place and resolves, leading us into the denouement, the end of the novel where loose ends are tied up, and the protagonist's fortunes and life are once more stable.

Plot II

In the previous article (above), we discussed what plot is, what role it plays in the novel, and how it usually unfolds, creating a dramatic effect that carries us through its length. In this article, I thought it would be helpful if we took the abstract concepts presented in the last article and applied them to an actual text, and I cannot think of a more exciting and current example than Dan Brown's recently published bestseller The Da Vinci Code. Aside from being remarkably entertaining, the novel follows the structure of Freytag's pyramid quite well, making it an obvious choice for examination here. If you are not familiar with aspects of plot, and if you have no idea what Freytag's pyramid is, please read the previous article and then return here. Otherwise, not much of this is going to make sense.

The novel begins (after a very brief section done in medias res, which we will discuss in a future article) with the expected exposition, as we are introduced to Robert Langdon, an American professor of symbology attending a conference in Europe. This gives us a slice of how things usually are for him, and although his world is likely very different from most of ours, we see what his idea of normal looks like. All of this is soon punctured by a late night phone call from the French police, who request his presence at the scene of a bizarre murder. This is the inciting incident, the event that takes us out of the normal world of the protagonist and thrusts us into the mission the protagonist sets for himself, decoding the clues and solving the mystery. If this event had never happened, there would have been no story and no novel. After all, no matter how interesting someone's daily life is, how willing would any of us be to read about it for 500 pages?

From here the rising action takes over, occupying most of the novel. It is here that the most important discoveries and adventures take place, where Langdon and company slowly unravel minor mysteries while revealing new ones, and where their quest is continuously complicated by the interference of many other characters and groups, including the French police and the shadowy Catholic organization Opus Dei. The central conflicts are established and expanded, and the events begin to unfold more and more quickly, building in speed and intensity until the climax, which occurs well into the second half of the novel.

The climax of the novel takes place when Leigh Teabing, thought to be Langdon's great ally, reveals that he is actually the master villain who has been organizing the forces that committed the inciting murder and which have been opposed to Langdon throughout the novel. Although the climax need not be shocking, it often is, and this case proves no exception. The climax is the moment of greatest dramatic tension, and while it does not mark the end of the novel, nor even the end of the suspense, it is the point which marks the most significant shift in the story world since the inciting incident.

From here, the novel presents its falling action, where Langdon and his partner Sophie confront Teabing and defeat him. They continue from this point, traveling to a chapel where they believe the Grail is hidden, but are disappointed. However, at this point they discover Sophie's family, whose origins and connections to her own life and the location of the Grail have been unknown throughout the novel, and we are thus brought to the denouement. Almost all of the mysteries have been explained, the loose ends have been tied up, and the excitement and suspense that have powered the novel to this point have dissipated almost entirely.

Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel

Introduction

Up to this point, all of the series have dealt with nuts and bolts of language, including how to use it correctly, and how to use it to achieve desired effects. These elements are absolutely necessary in order to make your writing, as well as your analyses of the writings of others, as effective as possible. Also, everything covered in the previous three series is applicable to almost any kind of linguistic act, whether that be informal speech, formal prose, or creative writing. In this series, we depart from our pervious methods and tackle a more specific kind of academic challenge, writing about the novel.

Although the study of other literary forms is important, nothing seems to power the high school or college English classroom like the study of the novel. Although you may find classes around the nation which feature no Shakespeare and very few poets, any general English literature course will have at least one and likely several novels to deal with in a given semester, and these works often become the central focus of the courses in which they are covered. Just as the novel has come to be the dominant literary form, outstripping both drama and poetry since its inception more than 300 years ago, so too has it risen above these forms in the public and private school systems.

At least part of the reason for this is that the novel is written in language that is most easily accessible to readers of a given time (though there have been some very important experimental exceptions). Poetry plays with and takes liberties with language to such a degree that it is often more difficult to understand than prose, and drama (to be properly appreciated) must be staged, a daunting prospect for many teachers and professors with limited time and resources. Further, the novel is of sufficient length to be a topic of study for an extended period of time, and it contains enough material that the teaching of novels and their devices in general is usually possible through the study of one or two good examples. It is currently the most teachable form of literature considering the current academic structure of North American schools, and it will likely continue to be so for many years to come.

Because it has become such a classroom staple, as well as a popular phenomenon outside of the classroom, the novel often appears to offer itself for analysis without much difficulty or resistance. Anyone who is literate can read and understand a novel, so it seems strange to many students that a specialized vocabulary has been developed to deal with it. My response to this sentiment is that not every literate person can understand a novel, and that although most will achieve a certain level of comprehension, there will be layers of meaning that those who have no background in novel study will miss entirely. Further, understanding of given novelistic phenomena is made exceedingly difficult if one does not have the terminology to give large concepts more convenient labels. By giving terms to ideas that would otherwise take phrases or even paragraphs to describe, we are able to speak far more efficiently, allowing us to penetrate to deeper concerns, rather than merely reiterating the surface devices we see again and again.

Think of the terms and devices presented in this series as tools for dissecting and exploring the inner workings of novels. Without them, you will be left staring at the outside of inert bodies, able to identify what you see but unable to explain how or why it appears as it does before you.

Using Advanced Rhetorical Devices to Surprise and Delight

Colloquialism

Although there are enough rhetorical devices for me to double, triple, or even quadruple the length of this series, it is time to put it to bed, and I have chosen to do so on a pleasant, relatively uncomplicated note. There is no doubt that many of you read the title term of this article, and asked yourself, "What kind of a word is colloquialism?" However, the concept is a simple one to learn, and once you have it, you will not easily forget it.

To make things even easier from the beginning, colloquialism is sometimes referred to as local color, which should provide a clue as to what the device does, although there are some subtle differences between the two terms. Colloquialism is derived from the Latin word (also now an English word) colloquium, meaning speaking together. The idea of commonality and equality is an important one here, as the term has to do with speaking comfortably with one's peers. The following sentence provides a good example of colloquialism: "Dollars to doughnuts says you miss your next shot." Immediately it is obvious that this is not something that one would see or hear in formal speech, and this is at the core of colloquialism. Colloquialism is the use of words, linguistic structures, or phrases which, while common in informal speech, are not considered correct or proper in formal speech and writing. In the example above, dollars to doughnuts is a very informal expression which is often used in betting situations. Translated into more standard English, it means that the person offering the bet will wager a given number of dollars on a particular outcome (in this case missing the next shot), and if victorious, will accept that number in return, but in doughnuts rather than dollars. When this expression first arose, there was an enormous difference between the value of a dollar and the price of a doughnut, so it became a way of saying "I am so confident I will win this bet that I will bet money and get almost nothing in return." In a few years, however, although the expression will likely maintain its meaning, the value of doughnuts will surpass the same number of dollars, and future generations will have to do some historical research in order to make sense of the phrase.

Many colloquial phrases are confined to a given geographic area, and so their use in these instances can also be called local color. When a writer or speaker uses these expressions, it adds something of the flavor of a particular area to the utterance, making it both less formal and less general. If I were writing a novel set in England, for example, I might have one of the characters say something like "That bobby used his billy to brain the bandit." Now, while I doubt I would find a publisher for a novel containing this line, people would at least have to recognize the excellent use of colloquialism in this instance. Bobby is a local term for a police officer, billy is a local term for a police bat, and brain is a verb (in this case not confined only to the UK) meaning to strike someone in the head. Here, we have a combination of informal speech and geographically delimited terms which present both aspects of colloquialism clearly.

Colloquialism can also be used (albeit in a limited manner) in more formal settings, when the speaker wishes to show her comfort with an audience, or to create a humorous effect. In contemporary popular culture, the reigning master of colloquialism in a formal setting is Dr. Phil, who has made his fortune by helping millions with his quick wit, firm advice, and country charm. Though he is a Ph.D. involved in many serious issues, he uses colloquialisms to create a persona of simple straightforwardness and a comfortable atmosphere for his guests. Some notable examples include his recurrent line "Get real!" which is an informal way of saying that the person to whom he is speaking needs to realize the problems with what they are doing and stop doing it. "That dog won't hunt" is another favorite expression taken from his southern American background, meaning that a given individual or course of action will not be successful.

Using Advanced Rhetorical Devices to Surprise and Delight

Anachronism and Archaism

Although neither of these terms enjoys much attention in current usage, their peripheral status and similar sounds (as well as spellings) result in their being confused with each other. So, I can kill two birds with one stone by presenting each of these rhetorical devices in one article, disambiguating the pair and elaborating on each in a single stroke.

When we do hear the term anachronism today, it is most often in the context of a review or critique of a fictional work, whether that be a novel or a film. The reason for this is that anachronism is at least as often an unintended error as it is an intentionally deployed device. Critics revel in spotting and exposing such errors, and publishers and movie studios expend considerable resources ensuring that the works they are responsible for do not contain these kinds of mistakes. To create an obvious example, suppose I am directing a film set in the first century BC, and I want the protagonist to make a comment about how social justice can be achieved. To support this theme, I make sure that a copy of the Communist Manifesto is visible on his bookshelf, which will tip viewers off to the larger issues I want them to consider.

Now, any observer who is at all concerned with historical accuracy will immediately rise up and shout "That's impossible!" with good reason. This book was still almost two millennia at that time away from publication, and so it is impossible that the protagonist could have a copy of it on his bookshelf. Even shrewder observers will be doubly outraged, for the presence of a bookshelf and the books upon it are impossible, as books were still a long way off, and scrolls were the objects upon which texts were recorded and stored at that time. This is a prime example of anachronism, which is the placement of events, objects, people, or any entity in a time or in an order which would have defied the actual progression of history. It can be used intentionally to create humorous effects, or in stories which present alternate histories or entire universes. In order to keep this term straight, remember that it contains the root chron, derived from the Greek word for time, and used in other English words like chronology and (less commonly, though often on older digital watches) chronometer.

Archaism, on the other hand, has little to do with time in general, but a lot to do with the past. The term derives from the Greek word for ancient, and we can see its presence in modern English in words like archaic. If one were to see the following in a modern novel set in modern times, there would be no doubt an archaism was being used: "Thou art a fool, Thomas, and I am going to make you regret ever having been born." Most of the sentence looks like something that could be heard today, but the beginning thou art is an obvious archaism. A word, phrase, or syntactical structure that was used at some point in the history of the language but which has since fallen out of standard use is an archaism. There was a time when thou art was standard English, but if you used this on your classmates tomorrow, you would certainly get some strange looks. Archaism is effective for creating a solemn or ritualistic tone, or to create an atmosphere of a bygone time or place. As a result, it is still present in some modern prayers (Our Father, who art in heaven), and is employed in film and literature to evoke images of a given historical period.

Using Advanced Rhetorical Devices to Surprise and Delight

Epanorthosis

Continuing with the recent trend this series has adopted, this article will once again deal with a device that presents an intentional error in order to exploit a rhetorical effect. Of course, even devices of this kind are never simply built around the insertion of random errors, but rather rely on the common knowledge of standard language in order to contradict the expectations of the reader in an ordered and systematic way. So, although rules are being broken, they are broken according to specific criteria which allow consistent effects to rise to the surface.

As for most of the devices we have covered so far in this series, epanorthosis is fairly common in everyday speech, and occurs frequently in written prose, especially creative writing. In the case of epanorthosis, we have a device that not only presents an error, but one which also includes its own correction. The following sentence provides a good example of this term in action: "We fished for hours, no, days!" As you can see, epanorthosis begins by introducing a statement of fact, and concludes by correcting this statement. The type of epanorthosis presented here most often deals with magnitude or quantity; the original assertion makes a relatively modest claim, and the correction increases it significantly. The effect of this device is similar to that used in advertising (indeed, this device features prominently in many ads), where the salesperson gives a particular price for an item or series of items which is supposed to seem reasonable or normal, and then offers a remarkably discounted price. This exaggerates the value of the deal in question, and although the second term is lesser than the first, the magnitude of the deal is exaggerated. In the same kind of advertising, sellers will often offer a product for a given price, and then correct this initial offer by adding other features or more copies of the product, once more making the magnitude of the deal more impressive.

Another species of this device can occur after a Freudian slip or a slip of the tongue, in which an individual says one word in place of another apparently by accident, and then corrects it with the proper word, as in the following example: "That doctor is a quack - I mean a crack diagnostician!" Here, as in the first example, a statement is made (or mostly made: diagnostician is needed to complete the thought), but it is immediately corrected. The primary difference between this example and the previous one is that humor and biting wit are the goals in this case, whereas in the previous example the goal was exaggeration through comparison. The person apparently intended to state that the doctor was a crack diagnostician, meaning she diagnoses patients like a "crack shot" hits her target - with unfailing accuracy. However, he "accidentally" substitutes quack for crack in his initial construction of the sentence. Noticing he has said this, he immediately corrects himself, and fills in the correct word with added emphasis, concluding the thought. But of course, this is no accident. Because of the similar sounds of the words crack and quack, the speaker of the sentence has been able to create a kind of pun, which likely expresses his true feelings about the doctor. This device is a staple of television comedy, where the social norms of a given situation prevent the speaker from saying what he or she really feels. Instead, the individual states his or her honest belief quickly, and then rescinds it immediately, pretending that he or she merely got the similar sounding word wrong. In real life, this would be offensive and no one would actually believe that the individual made any kind of error at all, but in the realm of fiction, we can suspend our disbelief and enjoy the humor this device generates.

Using Advanced Rhetorical Devices to Surprise and Delight

Catachresis

As those of you who have been reading this series might already suspect, catachresis is another term we have inherited from the Greeks, and it refers to the improper use of a word or phrase. Of course, this general definition is insufficient, because as we have seen, there are many rhetorical devices which rely on semantic and syntactic errors to produce their desired effects. More precisely defined, catachresis involves the clash of concepts, sometimes from different categorical levels, in the creation of a single image. This sounds nice (to me, at least!), but perhaps an example followed by another will better help to illustrate the various species of this strange beast known as catachresis.

One of the most common types of catachresis is known as the mixed metaphor, and we can see a good one in the following sentence: "Her heart was like a sunken ship, burned to ashes in the furnace of unrequited love." Now, despite the catachresis here, it is still obvious what basic message is being communicated: a woman is heartbroken because she loves someone who does not return her love. However, looking at the imagery itself rather than at the sub-surface content, we can see highly incompatible comparisons in close proximity. We start with a sunken ship, which on its own is fitting for it captures that low, sinking feeling which despair brings on, as well as the host of negative associations present between a broken ship and a broken heart. However, in the next part of the sentence, we can see that the sunken ship is described as being burned to ashes in a furnace. Can a sunken ship even be burned? Is the underwater scene set in the beginning of the sentence at all compatible with the fiery destruction of the second? The answer is obviously no, but this kind of construction is surprisingly common because both aspects of the description provide good metaphors for way the woman is feeling. The problem is that they are forced together even though they do not fit at all, and thus we are left with catachresis.

Of course, this device is not always used by accident (otherwise it would appear in the series on errors rather than this one on rhetorical devices); the above example, for instance, might be used to create a humorous effect, perhaps in a cutting parody of modern romance novels which tend to use inflated language and sentiment. The following example shows a definite instance of intentional catachresis in the creation of a desired effect: "The delicious chocolate, so long anticipated, melted slowly on my tongue, and for a moment it was Christmas in my mouth." Here, it will be obvious to most readers what is intended by the evocation of Christmas in this context. We (in the West, for the most part) associate Christmas with very positive things, and it is a celebratory festival of the highest order. However, the sentence places Christmas inside the narrator's mouth as he eats, and this simply makes no sense when considered literally. A holiday cannot be bound to such a small location, and its time is set up according to the calendar, not a given sensory experience. Also, who in the mouth is celebrating Christmas, and how are the presents, tree, and lights able to fit? Despite this radical disjunction between the image and the act, the meaning is clear, and we are able to apply a rich (though unexpected) set of associations to the act of eating, which, while literally impossible, make perfect sense on a figurative level.

Using Advanced Rhetorical Devices to Surprise and Delight

Anacoluthon

Most of the devices we have examined so far have relied on the construction of patterns and repetitions to create meaning and to produce rhetorical punch. There are some devices, however, which must tear apart normal linguistic structures to achieve their effects, and anacoluthon is one such example of these. Looking at the word more closely, if you have read the other articles in this series you can likely already state its language or origin. It comes from the Greek word anakolouthon, which can be divided into its prefix an, meaning not, combined with the root word akolouthos, meaning follow. This translates approximately to not following, or does not follow, and this is a fitting name for the phenomenon this device describes. An even more suitable translation is without completion, and this strikes at the heart of what anacoluthon does.

Anacoluthon occurs when a sentence shifts syntax, beginning with a construction that is not completed by what follows after it. The following example shows the two halves of the sentence that are not syntactically compatible through a shift in formatting: "After all these years, all the time and money I have spent on you, and you just wake up one morning and say goodbye with no explanation!" Looking at the first half of the sentence, we can see that the lead word after indicates the sentence is beginning with a subordinate clause, meaning that a main clause led by a subject must follow it for it to be grammatically correct. Appropriately completed, this sentence might look like this: "After all these years, all the time and money I have spent on you, I can't believe you are leaving." However, in the example of anacoluthon above, the main clause never arrives, and instead the last half of the sentence finishes a thought that is obvious, but not grammatically presented in the first half of the sentence.

In the next example, we see a subject and verb set up in what should be a main clause, but a lack of object or compliment to complete the thought leaves the sentence incomplete: "I could really use, ah, never mind, you probably wouldn't give them to me anyway." The subject I states that he or she could use ... something, but this thing is never named, and the direct object slot in this sentence is never filled by anything. Instead, the sentence shifts syntax, and the object is only ever implied.

Both of the above examples are grammatically incorrect, and if you construct sentences like these on your formal writing assignments, expect to be marked down significantly. However, since we are discussing rhetorical devices, it is obvious that this grammatical disjunction must be productive of an effect which makes breaking the rules of grammar worthwhile. The main thing we notice about this device is that it occurs spontaneously in regular speech all the time, to such an extent that we often fail to notice it. Part of the reason for this is that it is more difficult to hold the various pieces of a long sentence together in memory to strict grammatical standards; as a result, we sometimes let the general point or points we want to make take precedence over the syntax of the sentence, so that we jump to what we really want to say before we have technically finished what we have begun saying. This is especially true when we are angry, upset, or excited, and the intensity of our emotions can serve to break up our smooth prose significantly. So, anacoluthon is most often used to convey these sorts of emotions, and is an effective way to represent actual speech.

Using Advanced Rhetorical Devices to Surprise and Delight

Antonomasia

Although the names of the devices in this series seem to get more and more bizarre to the mind of the English speaker (and more daunting to pronounce as a result), their actual definitions and functions thankfully do not grow proportionately complex. We find that in the case of antonomasia, we have a device that, like so many others on the list, describes a linguistic phenomenon that we have all heard and used many times, but simply did not have a term to describe. One of the most fascinating aspects of the study of rhetoric to my mind is the gradual discovery that every way you can think of saying something, every common arrangement of words to produce a given effect, has a name, and has been defined, even though most people are not aware of this. Knowing the names of such things allows you to use, identify, and examine them far more efficiently. Some students have asked me why all of these terms are even necessary, when we could just use "simple English" to describe them. My response is that it is far more efficient and focused to use rhetorical terms. After all, imagine writing a paper contrasting the uses of pleonasm to the use of ellipsis in a short story. Your title could be "Pleonasm versus Ellipsis in Short Story X" if you use the rhetorical terms, or it could be "The Use of Redundant Words in Proximity for Clarification or Emphasis versus the Act of Omitting Grammatically Necessary Words (Usually in Parallel Constructions) to Concentrate Meaning in Short Story X" if you choose not to use the terms. In this field as in many others, technical terminology serves as a kind of shorthand, providing convenient tags which memory can retrieve quickly, thereby gaining efficient access to the various contents associated with those terms.

Turning now to the title term before I am knocked completely off-track, we can define antonomasia as that device you have heard thousands of times, whereby a word or phrase is substituted for a proper name. Technically, I suppose this might include all of the unfortunate names that people call each other in anger every day (like idiot, pig, half-wit, and the whole family of even more offensive examples), but in literary usage it describes a term which is consistently substituted in the place of a given proper name. One excellent example (or more properly, several examples) is the host of names given to Jesus of Nazareth. He is known as The Lamb of God, The Prince of Peace, The Redeemer, The Savior, The Son of God, The Right Hand of the Father, and many others. In every case, we can see his proper name is being replaced with a descriptive phrase, and this is the core of antonomasia. Other well known examples include, fittingly enough, all of the names people have given the devil, like The Prince of Darkness, The Tempter, Old Nick, and the rest. Elvis Presley is known simply as The King, Babe Ruth The Sultan of Swat, Bob Cole The Voice of the Maple Leafs, and Lord Voldemort He Who Must Not Be Named.

Antonomasia is sometimes also applied to the opposite of the naming substitution described above, where a proper name is substituted in place of a more general descriptive label. For example, I can refer to someone as an Einstein, which indicates that he (or she, even though the genders do not fit in this case) is a very intelligent person. Shifts in popular culture lead to many shifts in this kind of naming, as new characters emerge and enter the popular consciousness. For a time, it was possible to refer to an obnoxious male teen as a Stiffler after the American Pie movies, and currently, calling someone Bill Gates means he or she has an excessive amount of money.

Using Advanced Rhetorical Devices to Surprise and Delight

Cacophony and Euphony

In a previous series, the idea of 'sound effects' as figurative and rhetorical devices was considered, and we explored the definitions and effects of such terms as alliteration, assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia. Here, we turn to more obscure terms, which, despite their difficult appearance, actually describe concepts which are some of the easiest to understand, and which could have been included in the more basic series if they were more widely used and understood.

Once more we can look to the Greek fathers of rhetoric for the origins of these words, starting first with cacophony. Our modern English term comes from the very similar Greek word kakophonia, which translates roughly to bad-sounding. The roots of the word are telling, as the Greek word kakos means bad, while the phon means sound or voice, and is common in many English words like telephone, phoneme, and phonics. In normal English parlance, cacophony is used to describe a chaos of sound, like hundreds of different animals crying in unison or many industrial machines operating at once. In its use as a rhetorical term, cacophony can be applied to any linguistic construction that sounds displeasing to the ears, usually resultant from the arrangement of words next to others with which they clash, and featuring harsh sounds in general. The following example employs the device effectively: 'The clash of rocks whispered against his gizzard, crushing the trachea and smashing his voice forever.' Here, we first notice the presence of many sounds that exit harshly from the mouth or require some oral contortions to pronounce correctly, like cl, ck, g, cr, tr, ach, and sm. These sounds are somewhat cacophonous on their own, but in combination in such a concentration, the result is all the more unpleasant sounding. Note also the contrast between most of the words in this sentence and whispered; the former tend to grind themselves abruptly out of the throat and mouth, while whispered glides out in a breath of w- and vowel-driven air, making the sentence even more cacophonous.

Euphony, on the other hand, is precisely the opposite of cacophony, making them true antonyms. Turning once more back to the Greek, we can see that this word possesses the same suffix as cacophony, phon, which we know relates to sound. The prefix this time, however, is eu, which comes from the Greek word for good. So, we are left with good-sounding as a basic translation, and once more this is a good place to begin a discussion of euphony. Like cacophony, euphony can be used in general conversation to describe anything that sounds pleasant, although the word is so rare that it is used even less then cacophony in general conversation. In its role as a literary term, it is used to describe the placement of words in such an order that they create a pleasing sound. Meter, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance, internal rhyme, and the whole family of sound effects can be employed to achieve euphonic effects, and the device is thus especially well suited to poetry, where sound is a major consideration.

It must be noted at this point that cacophony and euphony are not such strictly defined entities as many of the other rhetorical devices we have explored so far in this series and others, since they are not based on a particular arrangement or scheme. Further, making judgments regarding either of these terms will necessarily be somewhat subjective, and although you can support your claim with evidence of harsh sounds or pleasing patterns, ultimately it will be difficult to settle any arguments that arise over examples of these terms. That being said, I think both still have a place in literary discourse, and I recommend using these terms rather than their more widely known but less descriptive counterparts good-sounding and bad-sounding. So long as you can support your statements with good evidence, your claims will stand.

Using Advanced Rhetorical Devices to Surprise and Delight

Tmesis

Although this word looks highly foreign and practically unpronounceable, it describes a rhetorical device that you have certainly heard many times in your life, potentially even this very day. The strange look of the word, featuring the noticeable absence of a vowel between the consonant pair t and m, is a result of its Greek origins. It comes from the Greek noun meaning cut, and knowing this will help you to remember what the word means and how it is used.

Tmesis is the insertion of a word or words between parts of a compound word, or even between syllables of any word, to add emphasis or humor. The Greeks and later the Romans used this device to create interesting effects, especially within their infinitive verb forms that, unlike ours, were composed of single words (whereas ours are constructed from the preposition to followed by the verb proper), meaning that splitting them is hardly seen as anything extraordinary (though some hard-line grammarians would call the insertion of words between parts of the infinitive an error). Tmesis sounds complicated at first, but once you have read some examples, you will have no problem recognizing this device, and will likely come up with many of your own examples to compliment these:

"He wanted me to do the im-bloody-possible, and I told him to go to hell!"

"That was an abso-f%$ing-lutely fan-fu%$ing-tastic concert!"

"Hi-diddly-ho neighbor!"

The one thing all of these statements have in common, besides the exclamation mark which follows them, is the insertion of a word within another word somewhere within the sentence. In the first example, we get the very British-sounding bloody sandwiched between the two halves of the word impossible. In modern English, both in North America and abroad, the inserted word in any case of tmesis is almost always an explicative. As a result, it is used to express anger, frustration, or excitement, and so the device almost always adds a heightened feeling to the sentence in which it occurs, which accounts for the aforementioned exclamation marks all of the sentences above have in common.

The second sentence is the sort I have heard most often, and one which I believe to be most widely used in spoken English, though not in print for reasons of censorship. In more polite company, one may substitute the word frigging, friggin', fricking, frickin', freaking, or freakin' in place of the widely deprecated (yet somehow ubiquitous) F-word. Here, as opposed to the first example, a positive evaluation of an experience results in the joy that tmesis is used to express, and although it may sound vulgar to some ears, whoever is uttering the sentence means no offence and is not being in any way insulting. I must admit I am a fan of this construction in the form in which it is here listed; however, if you find yourself in company which would not appreciate this use of the word, I suggest forgetting about it completely rather than substituting one of the optional, less offensive F-words listed above. It is a device designed to add great emphasis, and by substituting the main intensifying word, you are castrating the rhetorical effect.

As many of you will know already, the final example is taken from the long-running animated sitcom The Simpsons. One of the major characters, Ned Flanders, is a very enthusiastic (and I use this term deliberately: look up its origins to see why it is so appropriate) Christian do-gooder who has likely only uttered a handful of vulgar expletives in his entire adult life. So, in order to add punch to his statements, Ned often inserts the word diddly between and within various words. It really has no meaning on its own, but it does convey Ned's excitement and enthusiasm very well in an appropriately Christian and neighborly way.

Using Advanced Rhetorical Devices to Surprise and Delight

Paralipsis

In order to begin this discussion of one of my favorite rhetorical terms, I will start with an example like those you have heard and will likely hear again in the arena of politics: "Although my opponent has once more stooped to name calling and character assassination, I will not sink to his level; I could bring up his drinking problem, gambling addiction, spousal abuse charges, and criminal record, but I will not because that would make me as despicable as him." Read this through again once or twice and try to formulate in words what it is you have noticed. Do you see a contradiction here? Did you find this humorous? If so, it is because of the cunning nature of paralipsis.

Paralipsis is the mention or even the discussion of a given topic at the same time it is supposedly being removed from consideration. In other words, you claim that you will not mention something, but in saying that, you have actually mentioned it explicitly! Turning to the above example, we can see that paralipsis is operating in full force. The politician who is speaking the sentence frames the entire statement by claiming he is better than his opponent, because his opponent has apparently been badmouthing him during the campaign. So, the speaker states that he refuses to sink so low as to badmouth his opponent, which is thus far completely consistent, but then he moves into a witty reversal which is where the paralipsis is born. When he states that he will not mention his opponent's diverse and incriminating social and legal problems, he actually lists all of these problems to whoever is listening, whether they be the voting public, the media or (most likely) both together. So, even as the speaker claims he will not stoop to his opponent's level by badmouthing him, he does this through the mere mention of his opponent's previous crimes and problems. This (intentional) contradiction creates a witty, humorous, memorable effect, meaning that those who hear it are even more likely to remember it than statements (like those his opponent likely made) made in a more direct manner.

Although large obvious examples like the kind explained above are the most entertaining sort of paralipsis, there is also a weaker manifestation of the device which is so common in our daily speech that its rhetorical effects have been muted considerably. Take, for example, the following sentences:

"You were completely incompetent, not to mention rude and unbelievably loud!"

"It goes without saying that you will have to come alone, without any family or friends for company or support."

In the first example, we see the common phrase not to mention, which has become a stock way to include extra considerations beyond the first which are not as important but still have some bearing on the situation. Here, the person is accusing someone of being incompetent primarily, and then rude and loud, although she claims she will not mention the rudeness or loudness. In the second example the popular goes without saying is employed, but of course any statement which follows this will be an example of paralipsis because you are obviously going to go on to say the very thing you have just claimed will go without saying. This stock phrase has little of its rhetorical power left, and is now just another way of amplifying the importance of what follows, and could be replaced with obviously without any real loss of meaning.

Using Advanced Rhetorical Devices to Surprise and Delight

Ellipsis

As was the case for the rhetorical device parenthesis, most people know something about ellipsis, but not through its use in rhetoric. As we recall from a previous article, the paired punctuation marks parentheses are widely known and used, while their related but distinct rhetorical partner parenthesis is virtually unheard of. All of us know ellipses, perhaps by another name like infinity dots, because the three little periods in a row (...) are very common in informal prose, and even have many proper uses in formal writing. These are used to suggest that something is missing, and also perhaps that a given thought continues beyond the words on the page. The rhetorical use of the term is related, but it has other aspects which are quite distinct, and ellipses (the punctuation marks) are not even necessary for its construction.

In rhetoric, ellipsis refers to omission of words which are technically required by a given sentence, but which can be omitted without losing the sense of the sentence. In the following example, there are two very subtle uses of ellipsis: "The jail still held the heart I lost and the finger I stole." Although this is an odd sentence, it reads smoothly and looks completely correct in a conventional way; so, where is the ellipsis? Read the first part of the sentence, and narrow in on the phrase "the heart I lost." Is there a word missing here? Compare that phrase to the following one with exactly the same meaning: "the heart that I lost." After seeing the modified version, the ellipsis of the first example becomes clear. That is missing in the first sentence in two different places, before both occurrences of I. We tend not to notice it is missing because this kind of shortcut is very common in English, but just because it is understood to be there does not mean it is actually present. As a result, we have a very common and very brief case of ellipsis.

In the example above, the effects of ellipsis are not completely obvious, but they are present nonetheless. Read the sentence through once the way it is presented in the quoted example, and once with the missing thats inserted in their proper places. Do you notice any difference? Comparatively, the example which uses ellipsis is more compact and powerful because it eliminates words which have no real bearing on the sense of the sentence. English is full of small blocky words which need to be inserted into sentences to make them work grammatically, but often at the price of decreased euphony (pleasant-soundingness). Ellipsis allows us to eliminate some of these very common recurring words to smooth out the sound of our prose, with the additional effect of cutting the number of words in total and thus placing more emphasis on the important words in a given sentence.

In a more obvious but no less comprehensible example of ellipsis, we can see the chopping effect even more clearly: "The sparrow ate the fly, the eagle the sparrow, the bear the eagle, the lion the bear, and I the lion." In this odd remake of the lady who swallowed the fly, we can see that each clause after the first is missing its verb. Looking at the second clause in isolation, we would have no idea what was going on. We know there is an eagle and a sparrow, but we have no idea how they are related or what they are doing. This is because the verb ate has been elided from the clause, since it can be understood from the first clause that the verb should be mentally inserted between the animals of each clause. Through the creation of a parallel structure like we see here, ellipsis allows us to omit words which would be repeated, and make the sentence far more efficient. One could include the verb in every clause and still be grammatically correct, but the elided version of the sentence sounds better and conveys the important information more effectively.

Using Advanced Rhetorical Devices to Surprise and Delight

Asyndeton

Before we dig into this interesting rhetorical term, I think a note about the prefix a is in order. This might seem a little strange, but I have heard educated people applying this prefix incorrectly so often that I feel it needs to be addressed, and I can see no better time than in conjunction with a term that employs the vexing little letter a. Read the following statement, note where the a prefix stands, and see if you can figure out why it is not right in this context: "His actions were so amoral that there is no way he can be forgiven." If you spotted the a at the start of amoral as the offender in this sentence, reward yourself with ten points. Amoral is a proper and acknowledged English word, but it means "without consideration of morals, having nothing to do with morality, not being properly considered in terms of morals." The a prefix is used to indicate that what follows it is simply not present and not applicable, so in the above example, what is really being said is that the person's actions had nothing to do with morality, cannot be evaluated by moral standards, and had no moral element. What is really intended here is immoral, which features the popular and effective prefix im, connoting that the term it modifies is being inverted. Impossible for example, means not possible. It is the opposite of possible, and so immoral is the opposite of moral. Unless you are speaking of an advanced ethical system or philosophy, amoral is likely the wrong word.

That being said, we turn back to asyndeton with a clear idea of what its prefix means at the very least. A means without or lacking, and thinking back to the previous article on polysyndeton, we remember that syndeton has to do with conjunctions and joining. So, a lack of conjunctions is what is suggested by the roots of the term, and that is a fine description of what asyndeton is. It is the mirror of polysyndeton, and if you remember that poly means many while a means no or none, you will have no trouble keeping these terms straight in your mind.

The following example of asyndeton should make clear what the term is used to describe:

"We chased them on land, at sea, in the air. We hunted them in the forest, the jungle, the dessert, the mountains. We searched the ends of the earth. We found nothing."

In the first sentence, note that the three items are separated by commas, but and does not make its expected appearance between the last two items. This makes the sentence grammatically problematic, but note that there is no problem with the comprehensibility of the sentence, and a more dramatic effect is created. Asyndeton tends to speed up the passage, causing us to read more quickly, resulting in a feeling of being washed over by the stream of words that are pouring out. Items get piled up, and their accumulation draws us into the sentence, forcing our attention and making us anticipate what will come next, and when it will end. The second sentence uses the device the same way, but notice that between all of the sentences, especially between the last two, there is no coordination even though there well could be since the sentences are all dealing with the same topic. Asyndeton therefore is not merely a device that adheres within a given sentence, but also one which appears (through a noticeable absence) between them, refusing to coordinate. Here, the reader is left to make the connections, and although they are often obvious, this serves to involve the reader more directly, which means the reader is more likely to get swept up in the flow of the words.