Sequence and Contrasts in a Longer Plot: Study Guide (English Literature 6.3)

Story, plot and the gap between them

Imagine a novel whose events, in the order they happen to the characters, run: a childhood, a fire, a quarrel, a homecoming. A writer could tell them in that order. Or the writer could begin with the homecoming, flash back to the fire, return to the childhood, then explain the quarrel. The events are the same; the plot, the order in which the text presents them, is different, and so is the experience of reading.

• Story (or chronology): the events in the order they happen in the fictional world.
• Plot: the order in which the text reveals them.

A plot that departs from chronology makes readers ask questions: why begin here? Why tell us this now? That is why the course asks you to identify how a plot orders events and to explain the function of a particular sequence.

Four ways of interrupting chronology

Technique	What it is	Typical effect	How to spot it
Flashback	The text moves back to an earlier time	Supplies background, explains a present reaction, reveals what a character hides	A time marker (“eleven years before”), a change of tense, a memory
Foreshadowing	An early hint about a later event	Creates anticipation, unease or irony	A strange detail, a warning, an omen, a remark that gains meaning later
In medias res	The text starts in the middle of the action	Immediate engagement; questions that background answers later	An opening that assumes knowledge the reader lacks
Stream of consciousness	A continuous, associative flow of a character’s thoughts	Closeness to a mind; jumbled time as memory and present blend	Long, loosely punctuated sentences; jumps between memories and perceptions

The course notes that structures that interrupt chronology can directly affect readers’ experience by creating anticipation, suspense or tension. The mechanism is always about information: what the reader knows, and when.

Contrasts: where the plot sets two things against each other

A plot also arranges contrasts: a feast and then a famine, a calm chapter and then an explosion, a hopeful scene and then a cold one. These contrasts often represent contradictions or inconsistencies, and as a result they introduce nuance, ambiguity or contradiction and make a text more complex.

A reliable way to analyse a contrast between scenes is:

1. Name the two elements (the scenes, settings, tones or events).
2. Say what differs: mood, pace, who has power, what the characters feel.
3. Say what the juxtaposition suggests: irony, a threat beneath the calm, a cost.
4. Say how it complicates the work: what simple reading does it block?

Public-domain examples to learn from

Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847). The novel opens in 1801 with Lockwood, a tenant, recording his first visits to his landlord. Most of the story of the earlier generations is then told to him by the housekeeper, Nelly Dean. The sequence puts a puzzled outsider in front of the reader and delays the explanation, so the reader pieces together the past with him.

Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818). The novel opens with letters from the explorer Walton to his sister. Within them is Victor Frankenstein’s account, and within that is the creature’s own narrative. The nested order of telling puts the most disturbing perspective at the centre and surrounds it with listeners.

Macbeth (Shakespeare, about 1606). The play begins with the witches’ chant “Fair is foul, and foul is fair”. The line foreshadows the play’s reversals of appearance and truth before the audience has seen a single one.

Worked example 1: a flashback inside a present scene

Original passage written by Marlbridge for practice. It imitates the register of a nineteenth-century novel and is not taken from any published work.

The bell at Winterbourne was ringing again, though nobody had touched the rope in eleven years. Hale stopped in the doorway of the inn with his glass half raised.

Eleven years before, on the night of the fever, it had rung until the hour the last cart left the village, and his mother had stood where he now stood, counting the strokes aloud as if she could argue them down. He had been nine. Afterwards no one had spoken of the bell, and he had learned not to.

Now the landlord set down a cloth and said, with perfect ease, “That will be the boy again, sir. He likes the sound.”

Task. Identify the structural choices and explain their effect.

Step 1: the opening is in medias res. The first sentence drops us into an event, a bell ringing, with a puzzle attached: why should it matter that “nobody had touched the rope in eleven years”? We know nothing yet of the village, the bell or Hale.

Step 2: the flashback. The second paragraph begins with a time marker, “Eleven years before”, and shifts to the past tense of memory. It supplies the missing information: the bell is tied to “the night of the fever”, Hale’s mother and Hale’s childhood.

Step 3: the return to the present. The final paragraph returns to the inn and contrasts Hale’s frozen reaction with the landlord’s “perfect ease”.

Step 4: effect. The order of information makes the reader feel Hale’s shock before understanding it. By the time we know why the bell matters, we have already registered his reaction. The line “he had learned not to” speak of the bell hints at suppressed grief, and the landlord’s casual remark about “the boy” raises a new question. The sequence therefore builds anticipation and tension: it holds back who is ringing the bell and what the village has chosen not to say.

A model sentence. “By opening on the unexplained bell and delaying its history until a flashback, the narrator lets the reader share Hale’s shock before understanding it, and the return to the landlord’s easy remark sharpens the tension between a village that has forgotten and a man who has not.”

Worked example 2: a contrast between chapters

Original passages written by Marlbridge for practice.

Chapter 12. By noon the whole of Low Street had gathered in the yard of Harrow Mill, where the tables sagged with bread and the fiddler played till his bow wore through. Even Edmund Thorne, who disliked noise, was seen to tap the table in time.

Chapter 13. On the Monday the yard was swept bare. The great wheel stood still, and a paper nailed to the gate, written in a clerk’s neat hand, said only that the premises were let.

Task. Explain how the contrast between the two chapters adds complexity.

Name the elements. A harvest feast in a crowded, noisy yard, followed by an empty, swept yard and a silent wheel.

What differs. Mood (festive, then bleak), sound (the fiddler, then stillness), presence (the whole street, then nobody), and power (the community gathers; a clerk’s notice decides).

What the juxtaposition suggests. The contrast turns Chapter 12 into something more than a celebration. Because Chapter 13 follows, the feast can be reread as the community’s last gathering, and Edmund’s tapping “in time” gains an uneasy irony if he already knew of the lease. The “clerk’s neat hand” and the notice that says “only” that the premises are let point to impersonal procedure replacing the shared life of the yard.

How it complicates the work. The text blocks a simple reading of the earlier chapter as plain happiness. It introduces ambiguity about what Edmund knew and what the feast meant, and so invites the reader to look again. The effect depends on sequence: the same two scenes, reversed, would produce a story of recovery.

A model sentence. “By placing the swept, silent yard directly after the crowded feast, the novel recasts the celebration as ominous, and the notice in a clerk’s hand suggests that the community’s shared life has been decided by procedure.”

Common misconceptions

• “Story and plot are the same.” They are the same only when the text tells events in the order they happen. The gap between them is where structural analysis starts.
• “A flashback just gives background.” It also controls timing: what the reader learns, and just when, shapes anticipation and sympathy.
• “Foreshadowing means the writer is giving the ending away.” It creates expectation and unease. Often its full meaning is clear only later.
• “Stream of consciousness is only messy writing.” It is a structural choice that brings the reader into the flow of a mind and blurs past and present.
• “Writing ‘it builds suspense’ is enough.” Always say what is withheld or revealed, when, and what the reader therefore wants to know.
• “Contrast means two opposites.” A contrast can be between tones, scenes, expectations and outcomes. What matters is the nuance or contradiction it creates.

Where this leads

Sequence often depends on who tells the story, so Topic 6.4 turns to narrator perspective and reliability. Test yourself with the Topic 6.3 practice questions, review with the revision notes and track your progress with the checklist.