Elements of

fiction(continued)
Class 8
Geetha Bakilapadavu
Setting

• Place and time of the story- place, time, landscape, weather,

period
• a physical locale that shapes it, creates the story’s mood, aura
and quality
• situate us emotionally in the universe of fiction
• creates an emotional landscape- can be so charged with meaning
• ‘a slice of life’ or cultural panorama; a moment or an eternity
Setting-continued…
• Sets a background; real or imaginary
• Concrete or symbolic
• Hemingway’s realistic terrain
• James Joyce’s ‘ symbolic’ terrains
• Timeless and magical settings of Garcia Marque
Symbolism
• A symbol is something that represents something else by convention, habit,
resemblance or association
• An object which stands for something else (e.g. a rose)
• While signifying something specific, it also signifies something beyond
itself
• it is easier to say what a thing is like than what it is
• Symbolism can be defined as the representation of a reality on one level of
reference by a corresponding reality on another
• A symbol is felt to be such before any possible meaning is consciously
recognised, i.e., an object or event which is felt to be more important than
the reason can consciously explain is symbolic; secondly, a symbolic i
correspondence is never one to one but always multiple and different
persons perceive different meanings. ( W. H. Auden)
• Symbols are ‘organic units of consciousness with a life of their own, and
you can never explain them away, because their value is dynamic,
emotional, belonging to the sense consciousness of the body and soul, and
not simply mental…No explanation of symbol is final’ ( D.H. Lawrence)
• Symbols may add imagery, bring emotional poignancy, help in
characterization, conceal meaning , help in layering meaning,
connect ideas and themes, become motifs ( recurring ideas,
themes) , convey an overall mood

• Give examples of religious, emotional, and romantic symbols

From Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

• ‘Araby’: symbolizes the beauty, mystery, and romance;
something exquisite, from a far away land- the ‘Eastern
enchantment’
• the protagonist’s journey to Araby becomes a romantic quest to
the land of enchantment to get something exquisite
• What does the gloomy neighbourhood stand for?
Organic Unity
• Organic unity is a structural principle, first discussed
by Plato (in Phaedrus, Gorgias, and The Republic) and then defined by
Aristotle
• Aristotle: the action of a narrative must be “a complete whole, with its
several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of
any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole.”
• art grows from a germ and seeks its own form and that the artist should not
interfere with its natural growth
• internally consistent thematic and dramatic development- like an organism:
a recurrent, guiding metaphor throughout aristotle's writings
Continued…
• "the whole design of the work as a unit”
• "a simultaneous pattern radiating out from a center“ (Frye)
• ‘If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then
in the following one it should be fired.’: Chekhov’s Gun
• All components must fit in and must work together to
take the narrative forward- have their own internal logic
• Structural principle- patterns, repetitions, symmetry,
reversals, parallels, a centre of the work, how parts move,
how theme and all the other elements are connected
Continued…

• The condition of a literary piece whereby all its elements successfully

work together to achieve its central purpose
• Parts of a work exist so that they can make an organic whole
• ‘cut a good story anywhere, and it will bleed.’ - Chekhov.
Reliability of a narrator:
• Voice and distance, especially, but also focalization
have much to do with the narrator's reliability
(Wayne Booth)
• to interpret a narrative, we must have a fine sense of
how reliable is our narrator
• unreliable narrators, according to him "differ
markedly depending on how far and in what
direction they depart from their author's norms’
• The unreliable narrator Holden in the “Catcher in the
Rye” by Salinger
I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's
awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a
magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm
going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's
terrible.
 self reflexivity
• the text referring to itself; also, referred to as self-referential- art about art
• Self-reflexivity calls attention to its own artifice, violates the sense that what one
reads is real( verisimilitude, or breaks the boundaries between sign, signifier and
signified.; reflecting, through the narrator, about narrative strategies, the difficulty
of finding the right beginning or end, about the synthesis between reflection and
imagination
• often employs metafiction and metapoetry. it ‘endlessly studies its own behaviours
and considers them suitable subject matter’ (Shattuck 327)
• a self-consciousness, about the production of work of art
• Metafiction: fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of
fiction; poses questions about fiction and reality, reflects upon itself
• Characters know they are in a story
• Story contains another story within it
• Story about a writer writing a story
• Narrator talking about the process
Tone
• the attitude of the narrator toward his/her subject and toward the
readers
• Such as humorous, satirical, passionate, zealous, sarcastic,
condescending
• created or altered by the way the narrator treats the story’s
character, events, argument
• can be manipulated by changing what the narrator focuses on and
through his changing reactions to what is going on in the story
Style

• the writer’s choice of words/ diction, sentence structure, literary

techniques, and use of rhythm, use of figures of speech etc.
• Use of imagery, symbolism, allegory, personification- literary devices and
figurative language
Metamorphosis by Kafka
“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found
himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. He was lying on his back as
hard as armor plate, and when he lifted his head a little, he saw his vaulted brown
belly, sectioned by arch-shaped ribs, to whose dome the cover, about to slide off
completely, could barely cling. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of
the rest of him, were waving helplessly before his eyes.

"What's happened to me?" he thought. It was no dream. His room, a regular human
room, only a little on the small side, lay quiet between the four familiar walls. Over
the table, on which an unpacked line of fabric samples was all spread out--Samsa
was a traveling salesman--hung the picture which he had recently cut out of a glossy
magazine and lodged in a pretty gilt frame. It showed a lady done up in a fur hat and
a fur boa, sitting upright and raising up against the viewer a heavy fur muff in which
her whole forearm had disappeared.”
“Gregor's eyes then turned to the window, and the overcast
weather--he could hear raindrops hitting against the metal window
ledge--completely depressed him. "How about going back to sleep for a
few minutes and forgetting all this nonsense," he thought, but that was
completely impracticable, since he was used to sleeping on his right
side and in his present state could not get into that position. No matter
how hard he threw himself onto his right side, he always rocked onto
his back again. He must have tried it a hundred times, closing his eyes
so as not to have to see his squirming legs, and stopped only when he
began to feel a slight, dull pain in his side, which he had never felt
before.”
Plotting techniques
▪ Plotting Techniques:
▪ Subplots, double plots, multiple plots
▪ Flashback
▪ Foreshadowing: The feeling of excitement or nervousness that you have when
you are waiting for something to happen and are uncertain about what it is
going to be ( give examples)
Rose for Emily
• “WHEN Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her
funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen
monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of
her house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined
gardener and cook--had seen in at least ten years”:
• Who is Emily?
• Where is it set?
• What does tell about her?
• “Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of
hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894
when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor--he who fathered the edict that no
Negro woman should appear on the streets without an
apron-remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of
her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have
accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the
effect that Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which
the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying.
Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have
invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.”
• What all are being told?
• What style and tone?
• How is the narrative unfolding?
• The narrative structure and story: distinguish
• What do you think is being told in these:
"But we have. We are the city authorities, Miss Emily. Didn't you get a notice
from the sheriff, signed by him?"
"I received a paper, yes," Miss Emily said. "Perhaps he considers himself the
sheriff . . . I have no taxes in Jefferson."
Plot Structure

Source:
Objective correlative
T. S. Eliot:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by

finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of
objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the
formula of that "particular" emotion; such that when the
external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are
given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
• According to Eliot, there has to be a positive connection between the
emotion the poet is trying to express and the object, image, or
situation in the poem that helps to convey that emotion to the reader
• In general, they help to bring forth what lies hidden in the psyche of
the characters and feels that some external agents must be used to
express the hidden inner psyche of the characters on stage
• Find examples of ‘objective correlative’s in your readings so far
Araby by James Joyce
Araby
• Coming of age story- bildungsroman
• Allure of fresh love and the drudgery of the ‘everyday’
• Romantic idealism coming in contact with the real world
• Journey from the protagonist’s romantic ideas around beauty and
innocent love to the world of the mundane
• Rich imagery, descriptions of internal and external reality
• the boy’s life lighting up by the presence of Meghan sister’s presence
against the drab, dull (almost melancholic) Dublin evenings; of the
epiphanic moment
• First person pov
• Characterization
• Writing technique
• Setting
• Symbolism
• Tone
• The title
• The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the
houses, where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the
back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to
the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or
shook music from the buckled harness…
• It was a dark rainy evening…
• I looked over at the dark house where she lived
Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday
evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We
walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women,
amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by
the barrels of pigs' cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a
come-all-you about O'Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native
land.
These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my
chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in
strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often
full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour
itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would
ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused
adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers
running upon the wires.
A Rose for Emily by Faulkner
• Non linear narrative ( look into why and how of it)