Plot Order and Contrasts: Study Guide (English Literature 4.4)

A story is more than “what happens”. It is the order in which a writer chooses to tell us what happens, and the contrasts the writer builds along the way. This topic teaches you to describe how plot orders events, to explain why that order matters, and to explain the function of contrasts within a text.

Plot as a sequence of choices

The plot of a narrative is its sequence of events as the text presents them. Two things are easy to confuse:

• the order in which events happen in the story world, and
• the order in which the text tells them.

Most stories give events in chronological order, but many do not. A writer may open with the result of an event and then go back (a flashback), delay an important fact, skip time, or repeat an event from another angle. Each choice controls what the reader knows, and when. That is the key idea: the order in which a text reveals information is a structural choice, and the choice contributes to interpretation.

Questions to ask when you look at plot order:

1. What comes first? What does the opening make us want to know, expect or fear?
2. What is delayed? Which fact is held back, and what effect does the wait have: suspense, surprise, irony, sympathy?
3. What is repeated or returned to? Repetition marks importance and can show a character’s obsession.
4. Where does the order turn? A flashback, a time jump, a reversal: why here?
5. How does it end? Does the ending return to the beginning, reverse it or answer it?

Some patterns of dramatic situation are so familiar that critics call them archetypes; readers form expectations from them. You are not asked to label archetypes on the exam, but it is useful to notice when a story plays on an expectation (the reader expects a grief scene, and gets something else).

Contrasts: what they emphasise

A contrast places two things side by side so that their differences stand out. The difference highlighted by a contrast emphasises the particular traits, aspects or characteristics that matter for comparing the two things. In a plot, contrasts appear in many forms:

• a character’s outward behaviour against inner state (calm face, panicking mind),
• a before and after (a shut door, then a shared meal),
• two characters in a similar situation who respond differently,
• two settings or moments that echo each other with a difference.

Contrasts often represent conflicts in values, especially where they concern the perspective of a character, narrator or speaker on the ideas of the text. So when you identify a contrast, ask three things. What traits does it make visible? What values lie on each side? What does the story do with the conflict: resolve it, intensify it, reverse it or leave it open?

A method: sequence, shift, contrast, effect

1. Sequence. Write the events in the order the text gives them (a few words each).
2. Shift. Mark where the order turns or where information is withheld.
3. Contrast. Name the two things set against each other and the trait or value each represents.
4. Effect. Say what the order and contrast produce: tension, irony, a change in how we judge a character, a theme.

Worked example 1: order and contrast in a confession

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) is narrated by a man who insists he is sane. The text gives events in this order:

1. The narrator opens by claiming calm: “why will you say that I am mad?” and “how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story.”
2. He gives his motive: “I loved the old man. He had never wronged me” and “I think it was his eye!”
3. He recounts the seven nights of watching and the eighth night of the killing.
4. He hides the body and receives three police officers “with perfect suavity”.
5. A sound grows until, shrieking “tear up the planks!”, he confesses.

Step 1, sequence. Claim of calm → motive → nights → killing → concealment → officers → rising noise → confession.

Step 2, shift. The first sentences are a defence made after the events; the telling then runs forwards to the confession. The turn comes at the officers’ visit: until then the narrator is in control, afterwards the sound takes control of him. The same sentence pattern, “the noise steadily increased”, repeats as he loses composure.

Step 3, contrast. The central contrast is between the outward and the inner: he says he was “never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him” (outward kindness, inner plan), and when the police arrive he is “singularly at ease” yet grows “very pale”. Calm control is set against panic, and sanity claimed against the evidence of the telling. These contrasts emphasise the narrator’s self-deception: he insists on calm while his narration speeds into repetition and exclamation.

Step 4, effect. Opening with a claim of sanity makes every later detail a test of that claim. The slow, careful middle (“so cautiously—cautiously”) and the frantic last paragraph put control and collapse in the same story, so the reader sees the claim fail. The structure ends by confession, not capture: the narrator is beaten by his own conscience, which is the story’s point.

A model sentence. Poe opens with the narrator’s claim to be “calm” and then sets his careful, patient preparations against the frantic climax of the officers’ visit, so that the order itself exposes the gap between the self-image he defends and the guilt he cannot control.

Worked example 2: delay and a reversal

The following summary with excerpts was written by Marlbridge for practice.

The Spare Key. On Tuesday the spare key was not under the flowerpot. [Section 1.] A week earlier, Ines’s brother Tomas had asked to borrow it. “You’d lose it,” she had said, and shut the door on his answer. [Section 2.] On Tuesday, letting herself in with her own key, she found him asleep at the kitchen table, the spare key in his open hand, the kettle cold beside him. [Section 3.] She filled the kettle. [Section 4.]

Step 1, sequence. Present: missing key → a week earlier: refusal → present: Tomas found asleep with the key → she fills the kettle.

Step 2, shift. The story opens in the present with a small mystery, then turns back a week to explain a refusal, then returns to the present to resolve the mystery. The delay is the point: the reader shares Ines’s first alarm (is someone in her house?) before learning the key is in her brother’s hand.

Step 3, contrast. Two moments are set against each other. A week ago she “shut the door” on him; now she finds him inside the house. Her refusal (“You’d lose it”) is set against his possession of the key, and the closed door against the open one. The contrast emphasises two traits: her guardedness and his persistence. The final act, “She filled the kettle”, contrasts with the “cold” kettle beside him: where the room was cold and unattended, she creates warmth.

Step 4, effect. The order lets the story move from suspicion to tenderness in four short sections. Withholding that the key-taker is her brother makes the ending a release; setting the shut door beside the filled kettle shows a value conflict (guardedness against care) resolved, quietly, in favour of care. The brevity of the last sentence gives the reversal weight.

A model paragraph. Marlbridge’s story delays the revelation that Tomas has the key, so that Ines’s first alarm gives way to tenderness. By placing the flashback, in which she “shut the door” on his request, between the missing key and the sleeping brother, the order sets guardedness beside need. The final short sentence, “She filled the kettle”, answers the earlier refusal with an act of care, showing that the conflict between her caution and her love is settled in love’s favour.

Common misconceptions

• “Plot means summary.” A summary lists what happens. Plot analysis says why the order matters and what it does to the reader.
• “Flashbacks are interruptions.” A flashback is placed for a purpose: to explain, to ironise, to deepen a moment.
• “A contrast is just two different things.” A contrast matters when the difference emphasises a trait or a conflict in values.
• “The ending is separate from the order.” The ending is part of the sequence and often answers or reverses the opening.
• “I should label every part of the plot.” The course does not require labels. Use terms only when they help your explanation.
• “Contrasts must be between characters.” They can also be between times, places, words and deeds, or a narrator’s claim and the evidence.

Where this leads

Next, Topic 4.5 (study guide) looks at who tells the story and from where. Practise plot order and contrast with the practice questions, review the revision notes and tick off the checklist. Plot order returns in Unit 7 and in the longer-fiction topics of Unit 6.