N a r r a t i v e1 1 5What, finally, of the difference between narrative and plot? One
way to distinguish between the two is to think of the novels
of Agatha Christie. Christie’s crime thrillers are almost all plot.
Other features of narrative – scene- setting, dialogue, atmosphere,
symbolism, description, reflection, in- depth characteristion and so
on – are ruthlessly stripped away to leave little but the bare bones
of the action. The books differ in this respect from the detective
fiction of Dorothy L. Sayers, P.D. James, Ruth Rendell and Ian
Rankin, authors who have embed their plots in a much richer
narrative context.
Plot, then, is part of narrative, but it does not exhaust it. We
generally mean by it the significant action of a story. It signifies the
way in which characters, events and situations are interconnected.
Plot is the logic or inner dynamic of the narrative. For Aristotle’s
Poetics, it represents ‘the combination of the incidents, or things
done in the story’. A summary of it is what we tend to come up with
when someone asks us what a story is about. The plot of The Sound
of Music includes the Von Trapp family’s flight from the Nazis, but
not Julie Andrews warbling away on a mountain top or the fact that
she has slightly prominent front teeth. The murder of Banquo is
part of the plot of Macbeth, but not the speech ‘Tomorrow and
tomorrow and tomorrow.. .’.
There are plenty of plotless narratives, such as Waiting for Godot,
‘Thirty Days Hath September’ or Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man. There are also narratives which may or may not have
plots, in the sense that we cannot be sure whether some significant
action is afoot or not. This is sometimes the case in the fiction of
Franz Kafka. It is also occasionally true of Henry James. Paranoiacs
and conspiracy theorists are inclined to detect plots where there are
none. They ‘overread’ stray details and random events, finding in