The customary way of ordering the several episodes in a plot is to present them chronologically, that is, to approximate the order of their occurrence in time. Chronological plotting can be handled in a variety of ways. It can be tightly controlled, as in conventional five-stage detective stories. This is also the method in many historical novels, in which the separate episodes are linked closely and visibly in a firm cause/effect relationship, to give the impression of historical verisimilitude – “the way it was”. Each episode logically and inevitably unfolds from the one that preceded it, thereby generating a momentum that drives the plot forward its appointed resolution.
Chronological plot structure can be loose, relaxed and episodic. In Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the plots are composed of a series of separate and largely self-contained episodes, resembling so many beads on a string. The unifying element is the protagonist, as he wanders into and out of a series of adventures that, in their totality, initiate him to life and provide his moral education.
A third type of chronologically arranged plot is encountered in psychological novels, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Wolf’s To the Lighthouse, in which the reader’s attention is centered on the protagonist’s unfolding state of mind as it wrestles with some internal conflict or problem. Her the interest is in the passage of “psychological time”, which, in these novels, is presented through a technique called stream of consciousness. Reflecting the 20th century interest in psychology, stream of consciousness attempts to give the illusion of overhearing the actual workings of a human mind by recording the continuous and apparently random flow of ideas, feelings, sensations, associations and perceptions as they register on the protagonist’s consciousness. The technique is difficult to sustain; and its effectiveness has been much debated among literary critics, in part because of the burden that it imposes on the reader’s patience and perceptiveness.
Finally, it is important to recognize that, even within plots which are mainly chronological, the temporal sequence is often deliberately broken and the chronological parts rearranged for the sake of emphasis and effect. Recall the two Hemingway’s stories in which we encounter the characters in the middle of their “story” and must infer what happened up to “now”. In this case and in others, although the main direction of the plot may be chronological and forward, the author is under no obligation to begin at the beginning. Hemingway has us begin in the middle of things; other authors may begin at the end and then, having intrigued and captured us, work backward to the beginning and then forward again to the middle. In still other cases, the chronology of plot may shift backward and forward in time, as for example in William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily, where the author deliberately sets aside the chronological ordering of events and their cause/effect relationship in order to establish an atmosphere of unreality, build suspense and mystery, and underscore Emily Grierson’s own attempt to deny the passage of time itself.
Perhaps the most frequently and conventionally used device of interrupting the flow of a chronologically ordered plot is the flashback, a summary or fully dramatized episode framed by the author in such a way as to make it clear that the events being discussed or dramatized took place at some earlier period of time. Flashbacks are often crucial to our understanding of the story, for they introduce us to information that would otherwise be unavailable and thus increase our knowledge and understanding of present events.
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