The Regents ELA Exam: Literary Elements and Techniques

Elements of Fiction and Drama
When we speak of fiction, we are generally speaking of narrative works—works in which events are recounted, are told, and which have been imagined and structured by the author. Although not narrative in form, drama shares many of the essential characteristics of fiction.

Plot and Story
The primary pleasure for most readers of narrative fiction is the story. If we become involved in a novel or short story, it is because we want to know how it turns out; we want to know what is going to happen to those characters. An author creates a plot when he or she gives order and structure to the action: in a plot, the incidents or episodes of the story have a meaningful relationship to one another. A story becomes a plot when we not only understand what happened but also why. In good fiction we are convinced of the causal relationship among incidents and we are convinced by the relationship of characters’ motives and feelings to the action.

Plot and Conflict
At the end of any meaningful story, something has happened; something is significantly different in the world and lives of the characters from what it was at the beginning. Conflict in the most general sense refers to the forces that move the action in a plot. Conflict in plot may be generated from a search or pursuit, from a discovery, from a deception or misunderstanding, from opportunities to make significant choices, or from unexpected consequences of an action. Although the term conflict connotes an active struggle between opposing or hostile forces, conflict in fiction may refer to any progression, change, or discovery. The resolution of conflict in a plot may be subtle and confined to the inner life of a character or it may be dramatic and involve irreversible change, violent destruction, or death.
Conflict may identify an actual struggle between characters, for anything from dominance or revenge to simple recognition or understanding. A plot may also focus on conflict between characters and the forces of nature or society. These are essentially external conflicts. A work may center on internal conflict: characters’ struggle to know or change themselves and their lives. Most works of fiction and drama contain more than one aspect of conflict.
In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the most dramatic conflicts are external, vivid, and literal: the street brawls between followers of the rival Capulets and Montagues and the fatal fight with Tybalt that leads to Romeo’s banishment and the tragic deaths of the young lovers. In Macbeth, the primary interest is in the internal conflict between Macbeth’s ambitious desires and his understanding of the moral consequences of the actions he takes to achieve those desires.
The action in Edith Wharton’s most famous story, “Roman Fever,” is ironically serene and pleasant: two middle-age women, long-time friends now both widowed, sit on a terrace overlooking the splendors of Rome and reflect on their common experiences and lifelong friendship. At the end of the conversation—and the story—their actual feelings of rivalry have come to the surface, and one of the two learns something that reveals how little she truly knew her husband or understood her marriage or the life of her friend. The conflict between the two women emerges almost imperceptibly and its meaning is only fully understood in the completely unexpected revelation of the last line.

Structure/Plot and Chronology
Narrative is not necessarily presented in chronological order, but it does have chronology. That is, incidents may be presented out of the order in which they actually occurred, but by the end of the work the reader does understand their order and relationship and appreciates why the story was structured as it was. Plots that are narrated in flashback or from different points of view are common examples.
 

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton are novels in which the narrator first introduces himself and his interest in the story, then tells it in a narrative flashback whose full significance to the narrator (and reader) is revealed only at the end. Tennessee Williams’s play The Glass Menagerie has a similar structure, in which the character of Tom serves both as a narrator in the present and as a principal character in the series of memory scenes that make up the drama. The memory scenes in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, however, are not flashbacks in the same way. Willy Loman relives incidents from the past while the other characters and action of the play continue in the present. As the play progresses, the shifts in time occur only within Willy’s mind.

Shakespeare’s tragedies are dramas in which normal chronology is preserved, as it is in such familiar novels as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

Narrative Point of View
The narrator of a work is the character or author’s persona that tells a story. Point of view is the standpoint, perspective, and degree of understanding from which the narrator speaks. For many students and scholars, the question of how a story is told is one of the most interesting questions. What is the narrative point of view? Is the narration omniscient, essentially the point of view of the author? Or, who is the narrator? What is the narrator’s relationship to the story? What is the narrator’s understanding of the story? How much does the narrator really know? Appreciating how, or by whom, a story is told is often essential to understanding its meaning.

One of the most easily discerned narrative points of view is the first person (I) in which either the central character or another directly involved in the action tells the story. J. D. Salinger’s novel Catcher in the Rye is a vivid and popular example of such narration. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is also told in the first person. In each of these works, the fundamental meaning of the novel becomes apparent only when the reader understands the character of the narrator. In each of these works, what the narrator experiences and what he learns about himself and the world are the novel’s most important themes.

In first-person narration, the incidents of the plot are limited to those that the narrator himself experiences. First-person narrators can, however, report what they learn from others. In Wharton’s Ethan Frome, the engineer who narrates tells us that he has “pieced together the story” from the little he has been able to learn in the town of Starkfield, from his limited conversations with Frome himself, and from his brief visit to the Frome house. Wharton’s method, of course, dramatizes Frome’s inability to express or fulfill the desires of his heart and reveals the reluctance of the people of Starkfield to fully understand the lives of those around them.

Authors may also use first-person narration to achieve an ironic or satiric effect. In Ring Lardner’s story “Haircut,” a barber in a small midwestern town narrates a story about a local fellow who kept the town entertained with his practical jokes on people. As the story progresses, the reader understands how cruel and destructive the fellow’s pranks were, but the barber does not. The narrative method in this story reveals, indirectly, a story of painful ignorance and insensitivity in the “decent” citizens of a small town. Mark Twain’s masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn, is told by Huck himself. Through the morally naive observations of Huck, Twain satirizes the evils of slavery, fraud, hypocrisy, and nearly every other kind of corrupt human behavior. Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Tell-Tale Heart” is the confession of a cunning madman.

In third-person narration (he, she, it, they), a story is reported. The narrative voice may be omniscient and, therefore, able to report everything from everywhere in the story and also report on the innermost thoughts and feelings of the characters themselves. In many novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the omniscient narrator even speaks directly to the reader, as if taking him or her into the storyteller’s confidence. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the narrator pauses from time to time to share personal feelings with the reader. Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby also does this, but the method is not common in contemporary fiction.

A widely used narrative method is the limited omniscient point of view. The narrative is in the third person but is focused on and even may represent the point of view of a central character. The actions and feelings of other characters are presented from the perspective of that character. Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown” is an excellent example.

Some third-person narration is dramatically objective and detached; it simply reports the incidents of the plot as they unfold. This narrative method, too, can be used for intensely ironic effect. Jackson’s “The Lottery” is one of the best examples. The real horror of the story is achieved through the utterly detached, nonjudgmental telling of it.

In some plays, too, there is a character who serves a narrative role: the Chorus in Shakespeare’s Henry V, the character of Tom in Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, and the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town are familiar examples.
In each of the works discussed here, narrative method is not simply a literary device; it is an intrinsic part of the meaning of the work.

Setting
The setting of a work includes the time and places in which the action is played out; setting may also include significant historical context. In drama, setting may be presented directly in the set, costumes, and lighting. In narrative fiction, setting is usually presented directly through description. In some works, the physical setting is central to the plot and developed in great detail; in other works, only those details necessary to anchor the plot in a time or place will be developed. Regardless of detail, responsive readers re-create images of setting as they read.
In addition to the physical and natural details of the fictional world, setting also includes mood and atmosphere. In some works, social or political realities constitute part of the setting.

The Scarlet Letter is not only set in Puritan Boston, it is also about that society; and The Great Gatsby presents a vivid picture of life in New York during Prohibition and the roaring twenties.

For some works, the author may create specific details of setting to highlight a theme. In Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies, the island on which the story takes place has everything essential for basic survival: there is food and water, and the climate is temperate. In order to explore the moral questions of the boys’ regression into savagery, Golding carefully establishes a setting in which survival itself is not a primary issue. In Ethan Frome, details of the harsh winter and of the isolation of a town “bypassed by the railroad” intensify the story of a man’s desperately cold and isolated life.

Character and Characterization
We understand characters in fiction and drama as we do the people in our own lives, by what they say and do, and by what others say about them. Because characters are imagined and created by an author, we can even understand them more reliably and fully than we can many of the people around us. Many students find their greatest satisfaction in reading works about characters to whom they can relate, characters whose struggles are recognizable and whose feelings are familiar.

Understanding character in fiction means understanding a person’s values and motivation, beliefs and principles, moral qualities, strengths and weaknesses, and degree of self-knowledge and understanding. To fully appreciate a work, the reader must understand what characters are searching for and devoting their lives to.

Literature also seeks to account for the forces outside individuals that influence the direction and outcome of their lives. These “forces” range from those of nature and history to the demands of family, community, and society. The response of characters to inner and outer forces is what literature depicts and makes comprehensible.

In literature courses and on examinations, discussions of character are the most common. That is because any meaningful or convincing plot stems from human thought, motive, and action. Depending on the narrative point of view a character’s thoughts and feelings may be presented directly through omniscient narrative or first-person commentary.

In “Young Goodman Brown,” the narrator tells us directly what the title character is thinking and feeling; in “Roman Fever,” the most important revelations of character are discovered by the reader simultaneously with the two central characters. Character in drama is revealed directly in dialogue and action, but it may be expanded through soliloquies and asides. In Shakespeare’s Othello, for example, the full extent of Iago’s evil is revealed through the variety of methods he uses to manipulate different characters and through the soliloquies.
 

In some works, the author’s primary purpose is to reveal character gradually through plot; in others, the author establishes understanding of character from the beginning in order to account for what happens. In the opening pages of The Great Gatsby, the narrator, Nick, who is also a character in the novel, introduces himself and declares his judgment of the moral quality of the people and events he is about to narrate. With Nick’s own character and motives clearly established, the reader then shares his gradual discovery of the truth about Gatsby and his life.

Theme
The subjects of literature may come from any aspect of human experience: love, friendship, growing up, ambition, family relationships, conflicts with society, survival, war, evil, death, and so on. Theme in a work of literature is the understanding, insight, observation, and presentation of such subjects. Theme is what a work says about a subject. Themes are the central ideas of literary works.

One way to think about theme is to consider it roughly analogous to the topic or thesis of an expository essay. If the author of a novel, story, or play had chosen to examine the subjects of the work in an essay, what might be the topic assertions of such an essay? The student is cautioned, however, not to overinterpret the analogy. Themes in literature are rarely “morals,” such as those found at the end of a fable, but neither are they “hidden meanings.” Although scholars and critics often express thematic ideas in phrases, students are often required to express themes in full statements. In the next paragraph are some examples of statements about theme.
 

Macbeth is a play about the temptation to embrace evil forces and about the power of ambition to corrupt; Macbeth himself makes one of the most important statements of theme in the play when he says, “I do all that becomes a man/who does more is none.” Ethan Frome and Lardner’s “Haircut” both illustrate that people in small towns do not truly understand the innermost needs and desires of people they think they know. William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies illustrates the bleak view that human beings’ savage nature will prevail without external forces of authority, that human beings are not civilized in their fundamental natures. In contrast, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain presents civilization as the source of corruption and finds truly moral behavior only in the runaway slave, Jim, and the ignorant boy, Huck.