Lecture 19: Pacing in Scenes and Narratives
summarizes Rose and Patrick’s unhappy 10-year marriage in
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divorce: They see each other in the airport in Toronto, and Rose
is shocked when Patrick makes a hateful face at her, a “timed
explosion of disgust and loathing.”z The pacing and the balance between action and exposition of each of
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o Tolstoy wants to show us that most of Ivan Ilyich’s life has
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years in order to linger on the last three months, when Ivan’s
suffering allows him to feel compassion for his wife and son in
his last moments. In order to do this, the novella needs to start
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moral and spiritual journey.o In “The Beggar Maid,” however, Munro is more like a lawyer
building a case. To prepare for that focused moment of loathing
on the last page, she needs to show in slow, patient, dramatic
detail why Patrick and Rose should never have married in the
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then fast-forward through the marriage itself and through the 9
\HDUVDIWHULWEHIRUHGUDPDWL]LQJWKH¿QDOHQFRXQWHUz Eleanor Catton’s 7KH/XPLQDULHV is set during a gold rush on the west
coast of New Zealand during the 1860s, and it has a complicated plot
involving secrets, conspiracies, and betrayals. Interestingly, Catton
chooses not to dramatize many of the most striking scenes—including a
shipwreck and a possible murder—and, instead, structures the novel as a
series of long conversations between various combinations of her large
and diverse cast of characters.
o During these conversations, the buried plot of the novel is
slowly revealed. There are a few passages of scene setting
and action, and in nearly every chapter, Catton pauses
the conversation to tell us something about the history or