Lecture 12: Structuring a Narrative without a Plot

Structuring a Narrative without a Plot ...............................................

Lecture 12

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a plot, at least not a traditional plot. Even if it doesn’t have a plot,

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not a story has a plot, something should change over the course of reading

it, if not in the story itself, at least in the heart or mind of the reader. In this

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the Freytag pyramid or the traditional plot.

Chekhov’s “The Kiss”

z The birth of the modern short story took place in the late 19th century

with the Russian writer Anton Chekhov. In his story “The Kiss,” the

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invited by a local landowner to spend the evening at his country house.

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wanders into a dark room and receives a kiss from a woman who has

mistaken him for someone else.

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discover who kissed him. For days afterward, Ryabovitch

fantasizes about the encounter, inventing a whole future life

with this woman, even though he doesn’t know who she is.

o At the end of the story, when his regiment returns to the same

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Ryabovitch loses his nerve and stays behind in the barracks.

z “The Kiss” reads like a conventional story; the scenes are laid out in

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doesn’t come to a climax or resolve in the same way as a traditional

story. Ryabovitch does not develop as a character. He has a brief