A Study On The Plot Of Joseph Conrad's Fiction

Stories are universal, present in every age and in every place. They are numberless and have an extraordinary variety of genres, capable of being carried by any media for expression, such as language, images, and gestures. One finds stories in legend, literature, history, stage performance, conversation and news. There are stories where there are human beings. We spend a phenomenal amount of our lives making stories, telling stories, reading stories and watching stories. Our existence does not depend on telling stories as that of Scheherazade does in One Thousand and One Nights, but we cannot do without stories because we think, talk and act on the assumption that one thing inevitably happens after another. We exchange information and experience with each other through stories; everyday life enters our conversation in the form of stories; news items, historical recountings and biographical writings are presented to us as stories. The world is chaotic, but we bring order into it by describing it in well-structured, goal-oriented and meaningful stories.Plot or story is important to fiction. Fictionists create a sequence of events interrelated in temporal order and causality through the selection and arrangement of writing materials. The sequence endowed with a neat structure and rendered toward achieving particular artistic and emotional effects is plot. It is through plot that the author makes the character's actions meaningful and the narration itself worthwhile. A study on plot should focus on the sequence of the events as a whole, not on the isolated happenings; on the dynamic process of the events, which is interrelated either temporally or causally, not on the static characteristics of the happenings; on an analysis of the events or the content, instead of the forms or the techniques, in terms of the artistic and emotional effects achieved. A study on plot is to reveal how the author makes a story, through which the action of the character and the narration of the author acquire significance. A study on plot is concerned with the characteristics of the given author's plotting and his self-reflexive meditation on plotting.The Russian Formalism focuses its criticism on defamiliarization alone, which is what...