Summary of the chapter "PLOT" from Aspects of Novel by E.M Foster.

 Plot:

Aristotle said that all human misery and happiness does and must take the form of an action and while he said that he had in view the drama where this concept holds true. It is true because happiness and misery exists in secret life and by secret it means the life for which there is no external evidence; so existence of any emotion remains unknown to the audience unless any action takes place.

But a novelist has an edge over the dramatist by having an access to the secret life of characters. He has an access to self-communing and from this level he can descend down and peer into their sub conscious. He can show sub conscience short-circuiting into action; he can also show it in its relation to soliloquy. For this he has to shift his point of view from limited to omniscient and can edge back again.

A literary work has two elements—human individuals and art. Human individuals are the characters while art has its two forms. The low form is the story while the higher form is called as plot. A plot is a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ”. According to Forster in the example “the king died and then the queen” is a story which demands curiosity. To him, curiosity is the lowest, simplest yet the common factor of every literary organisms knows as novels. He justifies his point by unfolding a character who asks you how many brothers and sisters you have every time he meets you. It is not because he is being sympathetic towards you  rather it is the curiosity that fills him with such questions. However, “the king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot since it is reflecting the sense of causality. Hence a plot is something that makes us ask the question “why”.

Intelligence and memory are the elements that contribute to a good plot. A good reader must be “intelligent” enough to know the inter-dependence of things working in the novel and to grasp all the aspects of novel as a whole. He mentally picks it up and sees the novel with two points of views; isolated, and related to other facts that he has read on previous pages. He gives the example of highly organised yet cross-dependent novel The Egoist which an ideal spectator cannot expect to view properly until he is sitting up on a hill at the end. Intelligence is closely connected to memory for one cannot grasp the situations and cannot develop intelligence unless one remembers the things. Let’s take the already mentioned example of “the king died and then the queen died of grief”. If by the time the queen dies we have forgotten the existence of the king we shall never make out what killed her. The plot-maker expects us to remember, for this is the only way to view all the previous things properly while sitting up on a hill. These two elements Intelligence and memory give rise to the third aspect that is mystery. Mystery is something that is kept secret or remains unexplained or unknown. It is essential and cannot be appreciated without intelligence. To appreciate mystery, “a part of mind must be left behind, brooding, while the other part goes marching on”. It occurs through a suspension of the time-sequence; a mystery is a pocket in time, and it occurs crudely, as in "Why did the queen die?" and more subtly in half-explained gestures and words, the true meaning of which only dawns pages ahead. Hence, mystery not only creates thrill to the reader but also helps in making the construction of the plot vast.

After discussing the elements of plot, let’s come to the relationship between plot and characters.  Plot is the events and happenings in a story while the characters are the people involved in it. Both the characters and plot are mutually exclusive categories. Just as the plot can affect characters, the characters can also affect the plot. The events of a story shouldn’t just be events randomly jumping out of bushes saying “HEY YOU THERE CHARACTER I’M GONNA GET YOU.” To a certain extent, the characters’ own actions and reactions should be pushing the plot forward. It’s no longer about what can happen but rather what should happen that would have this particular effect on this particular character. If you start out thinking about what the character’s goal is, you can come up with obstacles to that goal. If you want the character to learn some lesson, you can set up conflicts that will teach that lesson.  But the power to develop the plot with the help of the characters lies with the author alone."You can't find someone who doesn't want to be found." says Isabel Allende for her masterpiece, 'The House of the Spirits'. This indicates that a reader cannot find a character which the author does not want to show. Hence, Forster supports this fact by exemplifying the works of Meredith and Hardy.  In Meredith’s works, “incidents spring out of character, and having occurred it alters that character”, whereas, Hardy emphasised too much on plot. His characters are helpless in front of fate and just go with the flow of plot. This is what makes his work unsatisfactory despite many other remarkable qualities.

Too much emphasis on plot demands some compromise. Forster explains this from Charlotte Bronte’s Villette. “She allows Lucy Snowe to conceal from the reader her discovery that Dr. John is the same as her old playmate Graham. When it comes out, we do get a good plot thrill, but too much at the expense of Lucy's character”. His characters are helpless in front of fate and just go with the flow of plot. This is what makes his work unsatisfactory despite many other remarkable qualities.

 Death and marriage are the devices that the author uses to conclude his work. However, there are problems at the end for two reasons. First, there comes a time when novelist loses his creative strength before being able to complete his work and secondly, either the characters become dead because of the excessive over control over them, or they get out of novelist’s hand.

Novels have a note of predetermination since Foster assumes that the plot is always pre-planned by the novelist. The novelist always has a framework of his art in his mind beforehand. He raises the question whether or not this pre-determination is necessary in a plot. Why the work should be logical and the novelist should control his entire work. Forster rejects the modern Gide’s attempts of rejecting the traditional notions of prearranged plots. To him, it is fascinating and admirable to those who either emphasises on plot organisation or characterisation. When a novelist starts writing without any pre-planning of his work before hand, he would not be able to create a balance between everything. Either he would go on with plot or he would go on with characterisation

Modern novelists have done experiments with their art and as a result novels with a different plot structure can be found. Modern novels have more complex plots as compared to simplified plot structure provided by Forester. In addition to it new devices are employed to make the work more unique such as stream of consciousness, flashbacks, frame narrative, open ending etcetera. For instance in the novel If I Stay by Gayle Forman (published in 2009) the plot begins with the climax and then previous incidents are exposed through flashbacks. In another novel The Forty Rules of Love by Eliff Shafak a frame narrative is used—a story within a story.

Forester said that a plot must not be loose ended—it must have a definite resolution. But now lots of novels with an open ending can be found. For example Kim and Krickitt Carpenter’s novel The Vow ends openly, where the reader doesn’t know quite exactly about the relationship of the protagonists. Similarly an open ending technique is deliberately used in sequels where the novelists has to provide the reader with some mystery so that he reads further sequels, example of such a case includes L.J Smith novel series—The Vampire Diaries.