FICTION

A Brief Introduction

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 Few Facts
• Short story and novel are the major forms of
fiction used today. The Novella or the short novel
is a transitional form between the two.
• They originate from the oral tradition of story
telling and hence they have evolved from earlier
tales, fables, legends and myths. Think about the
stories from the epics.
• Since it is all about effective story telling,
language plays a very important role as it evokes
emotion, a visual image or a complex idea.
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 Contd.
• As the primary job is to tell an effective story,
the author many times, uses universal, mutual
experiences, anguishes, troubles and grief of
human hearts that transcend race, time or
condition.
• The above, combined with the writer’s
imagination produce intricate and elegant life
stories that appeal to all the readers.

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 Understanding Fiction
• Theme
• Plot
• Character
• Point of View
• Setting
• Tone
• Symbolism

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 Theme
• The main meaning or theme is an
amalgamation of content (notably characters
and events) and form (technique and style).
• Subject is simply the topic of the tale, while
theme grows from our perception and
evaluation of the story - it is, in fact, our
understanding of what the work says about
the subject.

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 Theme (Contd.)
• Some stories handle theme intensively, while
others blur theme, create multiple themes or
ignore theme entirely.
• Writers never reduce their stories to single,
prescriptive themes. Nor do they provide
messages, morals or answers. As Chekhov
says, that an artist “must set the question, not
solve it”.

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 Few questions that an author might
ask in his/her work
• Why is life the way that it is?
• What human (and inhuman) impulses and
motivations govern our lives?
• What are the critical events in the human
drama?
• What details offer clues to an understanding
of human nature?

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 Plot
• Plot is the planned arrangement of actions and
events in a narrative.
• The actions and events are causally related, and
they progress through a variety of conflicts and
opposing forces to a climax and resolution.
• It gives a narrative its power, uniqueness and
excellence.
• A plot can also be improbable, melodramatic or
coincidental.
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 Characteristics of a Conventional Plot
• Exposition or the beginning
• Rising action, a series of events – each event
causing the one that follows
• Climax, the critical or most intense moment in
the narrative
• Falling action where there is less intensity of
effect
• Ending or resolution, of the conflict
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Conflict: The most important aspect of
Plot
• External Conflict: When the main character is
struggling against someone (antagonist) or
some nonhuman force outside.
• Internal Conflict: When the struggle takes
place within the minds of characters.
• Conflict is multifaceted in a good short story.
More often it is subtle and complex and is
composed of various forces in opposition.

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 Character
• Characters are people in the narrative.
Generally can be divided into external and
internal.
• External like age, sex, job, status in society,
family background
• Inner qualities include mental and emotional
states, ethical and moral traits of the character
and the essence of the character.

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 Character (contd.)
• Though it is difficult to know the inner
character of a person in real life, the author
gives glimpses of such personality traits to
allow his/her readers to have a more
comprehensible idea.
• “The characters connect us with the vastness
of our secret life, which is endlessly
explorable.” (Eudora Welty)
 Fictional Character Formation
• Using varied fields like sociology and
psychology, a good writer creates, what E.M.
Forster says, “life within the pages of a book”.
• Characters are brought to life by the author’s
ability to see them vividly, to describe them,
to place them in the right relationship to a
problem or conflict, and to set them in action.

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 Character and Action
• It is hard to separate character from action in
any discussion of fiction. Character is action.
• “What is character but the determination of
incident? What is incident but the illustration
of character?” (Henry James)
• The characters become the starting point of
fiction and they speak to us about the
conflicts, problems, pleasures, possibilities,
and mysteries of existence.

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 Types of Characters

• Static or Flat: One who does not change in the

course of the narrative. S/He is more or less one-
dimensional and is easily recognized and
remembered as s/he is unchanging and
unalterable.
• Dynamic or Round: Essentially multi-dimensional
in his/her approach, has capability to surprise
readers in a convincing way and has tremendous
potential in his/her engagement with conflicts in
fiction.
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 Types of Characterization
• Direct: It is a rather conventional way where the
author literally tells us what a character is like –
the outer and inner qualities. Found mostly in the
18th or 19th century fictions.
• Indirect: Modern or postmodern fiction writers
generally use an indirect method of
characterization where they explore characters
subtly: what the characters do, what they say,
how they dress, what they look like, what they
think etc.

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 Point of View
• Point of view is the position or vantage point
from which the author presents the action of
the story.
• It allows us to see from a special narrative
perspective the actions, events, and
characters that an author creates.
• It is one of the most important technical
considerations for fiction writers, as it directly
influences all other elements in a tale.

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 Types of Point of View
• Omniscient: Here the author sees and knows
everything, moving across space and time,
commenting on characters and actions. S/he
becomes God-like in his/her creation.
• This is one of the oldest points of view, stemming
perhaps from the oral tradition.
• Many 18th and 19th century novels like Fielding’s
Tom Jones, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina use this omniscient
method.
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 Types of Point of View (Contd.)
• First Person: Here the author allows one
character to tell the story, thereby limiting
himself or herself to what can be seen, heard,
felt, thought, or known by that single character.
• The narrator speaks from the “I” frame of
reference and can project himself or herself as a
participant in the action, an observer of the
action or both an observer and a participant.
• Few Examples: Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre,
Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Charles
Dickens’ Great Expectations

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 Few Problems while using the First
Person Narrative
• The narrator cannot always see into the minds of
others.
• Special angles or perspectives on events cannot be
created easily.
• Events that the narrator has not witnessed cannot be
recounted reliably.
• Thus, the very reliability of the first-person narrator
can be called into question.
• To solve such problems, writers sometimes use “story
within a story” technique to present a more balanced
perspective. Most influential example can be Joseph
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

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 Types of Point of View (Contd.)
• Second Person: Here the narrator tells the story
to another character using “you”; the story is
being told through the addressee’s point of view.
It is the least commonly used POV in fiction,
though it can be found in guide books, self-help
books, do-it-yourself books, advertisements etc.
• Some Examples from Fiction: Tolstoy’s Sebastopol
Sketches, Hawthorne’s The Haunted Mind,
Camus’ The Fall and Faulkner’s Absalom,
Absalom.

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 Example of Second-Person POV
• Dxx“… the writing professor is obsessed with
writing from personal experience. You must write
from what you know, from what has happened to
you. He wants deaths, he wants camping trips.
Think about what has happened to you. In three
years there have been three things: you lost your
virginity; your parents got divorced; and your
brother came home from a forest ten miles from
the Cambodian border with only half a thigh, a
permanent smirk nestled into one corner of his
mouth.” (How to Become a Writer by Lorrie
Moore)
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 Types of Point of View (Contd.)
• Third Person: Here the actions, thoughts and
perceptions are filtered in the third person (by
pronouns like he, she, they, it) through the mind
of one character or the minds of several
characters.
• It can be limited or unlimited. With a limited
third-person POV, the action is filtered through
the mind/consciousness of only one character. If
writers desire a greater perspective on action and
events, they can resort to a multiple or unlimited
third-person POV.

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 Third-Person POV (Contd.)
• It can also be objective or dramatic when authors
refuse to enter the mind of any character. In such
cases, a writer views characters as we would view
other people in normal life. These figures are like
characters on the street or figures in a play. We
can only interpret them through their actions and
words, their behavior and dress and so on and so
forth.
• Examples of Third-Person POV: Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 and
George Eliot’s Middlemarch

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 Setting
• Setting is the place and time of story – where
and when the narrative take place.
• Real or imaginary, concrete or symbolic, a
moment or an eternity, setting is the dramatic
backdrop for a story.
• It is generally a physical locale that shapes a
story’s mood, its emotional aura or quality.
• Setting can be dark or light, melancholic or
happy, but it cannot exist without description.
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 Setting (Contd.)
• Example: From Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time :
They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the
morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools
of water in the courtyard. There were wet leaves on the
paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of
the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was
sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs
and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against
the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other
five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer
told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand
up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting down
in the water with his head on his knees.

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 Tone

• Tone is the writer’s “voice” that we listen for in a

work of fiction – his/her attitude toward the
subject.
• Through tone, we can sense a writer’s sadness,
sympathy, joy, irony while creating his/her work.
• The author’s choice and placement of words –the
composite language that we term style – often
serve as the basis of tone. Refer to the example in
the previous slide. See how Hemingway has used
his words to describe the execution.
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 Notable Aspects of Tone

•Irony
•Satire
•Paradox

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 Irony
• Irony is used to convey meanings and ideas that differ from
or are opposite to the apparent sense of certain words or
images. It shows the difference between appearance and
reality.
• Two types of irony widely used are dramatic irony or irony
of fate and verbal irony.
• In dramatic irony, the audience can see through the designs
of the play, but the protagonist does not. The irony is
enhanced when the protagonist is found to be working hard
towards his/her own downfall as in Oedipus Rex.
• In verbal irony, the words, by design or not, conceal the
real meaning and produce inconsistency.

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 Satire
• Satire is a comic attack on or criticism (censure)
of the follies, weaknesses and stupidity of
humankind.
• It is usually meant to be funny and its main
purpose is to have constructive social criticism.
• It is found in many artistic forms including
literature, films, plays, commentary, cartoons etc.
• Example: The Great Dictator (film) by Charlie
Chaplin, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and
Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock
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 Paradox
• Paradox is a group of words that leads to an
apparent contradiction.
• It can be of various types like paradoxes in
logic, philosophy, literature etc.
• In literature it helps in examining apparently
contradictory statements and drawing
conclusions either to reconcile them or to
explain their presence.

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 Paradox (Contd.)
• Miltonic narrator's statement in Book One of
Paradise Lost, that the fires of hell emit "no
light, but darkness visible”.
• Oscar Wilde's statement that "I can resist
anything except temptation”.
• Polonius’ observation in Hamlet that "though
this be madness, yet there is method in't“.

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 Symbolism
• A symbol is something that represents
something else by convention, habit,
resemblance or association. E.g. “running like
the wind”
• The word symbol is derived from the Greek
word symbolaeon and was originally political
and not literary. It referred to a group of
words making up a treaty or a contract.

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 Symbolism (Contd.)
• When an author uses a particular symbol, s/he wants
the readers to understand it as the symbol may give
certain clues to understand the story in a better way.
• There are many instances when the major symbol of a
story may be found in the title, which may also supply
the theme.
• There may be some common symbols used in literary
texts like a cross, daybreak, a rainbow etc., but
symbols may also be subjective.
• Symbols therefore, are very much cultural, national,
religious and psychological.

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