Lecture 11: Adding Complexity to Plots
o Chekhov’s rule about the pistol is also an implicit reminder
that a plot is not like real life. In our ordinary lives, we see
countless details every day, and we decide in the moment,
usually subconsciously, what’s important and what’s not. But
a narrative is not like real life: Every detail has a meaning and
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details are important, what details you can ignore or leave out,
and in what order you introduce them.z One example of foreshadowing is found in Flannery O’Connor’s short
story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” about a southern family that
encounters a criminal on a road trip to Florida. At the beginning of the
story, the family’s grandmother tries to talk her son out of going by
pointing out a story she’s read in the newspaper about a criminal on the
loose and headed toward Florida.
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as nothing more than gentle family comedy, evoking an old
woman’s groundless paranoia and her son’s taciturn refusal to
be manipulated.o Indeed, most of the story is a comic account of the family’s
road trip, complete with bickering children and a colorful
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when the family encounters the criminal, that you realize how
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wouldn’t have the same effect.z Another example is found in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, a novel about
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named Charles Gould owns a silver mine in this country, and in the days
before the revolution, he decides to hide his stockpile of silver so that
the revolutionaries can’t get it. To do this, he puts the silver on a barge,
which he entrusts to an Italian sailor named Nostromo and a young
journalist named Martin Decoud. They take the silver to an island off
the coast to keep it safe from the rebels. In the end, the effect the silver
has on Nostromo becomes the central moral dilemma of the book.