is sent to prison. He cannot stand it, so he tries to escape; he draws a longer sentence. When he is finally released, he is an outcast. He comes to a town where nobody will lodge him or serve him dinner. Then he sees a house with an open door—the house of the local bishop. This very well-drawn, altruistic bishop invites him to stay, serves him a meal, and treats him with all the deference due an honored guest. The ex-convict notices the bishop’s only valuable possessions: real silverware and two silver candelabra on the mantelpiece. In the middle of the night, the trusted ex-convict steals the silverware and escapes.
Given the man’s enormously embittered state, the reader can understand why he makes this choice. It is an evil choice, but it proceeds from the previous events of the story.
Then he is caught and brought back to the bishop by local policemen who recognize the silverware. They tell the bishop: “We’ve caught this ex-convict and he says that you gave him the silverware.” And the bishop says: “Yes, of course I gave it to him. But, my friend, why did you forget to take the candelabra, which I also gave you?” The police depart, and the bishop tells the ex-convict: “Take this silver. With it I am buying your soul from the devil and giving it to God.”
That is a scene. It is a beautifully dramatic example of turning the other cheek.
The bishop believes that his action will have a good effect; and the hero does reform, though not immediately. But everything he does is always conditioned by what he concluded (or misconcluded) from a previous event; and the actions of the police thereafter are always conditioned by their suspicion of him. The events are determined by the goals that the characters want to accomplish, and each event is necessitated by the preceding one—necessitated not deterministically, but logically. “If A, then B logically had to follow.”
By contrast, the events of a Naturalistic novel do not proceed one from the other, but are largely haphazard. A Naturalist has no principle by which to decide whether to show a family picnic, a day of shopping, a flower show, or a breakfast. The events are intended to present or influence the characters—and that is the author’s standard of selection. The central line is always the development of a given character; and the author stops when he thinks that he has presented the character well enough for the reader to understand him.
The predominance of characterization over action is the Naturalist’s distinguishing premise. Something does happen, but what happens is of less importance than what it reveals about the characters. For instance, Babbitt [a real estate agent] sells a new house, and the reader learns a great deal about his psychology. The event is not much; the meaning is in the characterization.
An event is an action taken in reality. If a character goes to the grocery store, this is an event, but not a very meaningful one—it is a random, Naturalistic event. If a character meets a man on the street and shoots him, this is a potentially meaningful event, if you discover its motivation. If the character took the action because of a previous event which forced him to make a choice, then the action is a plot event.
Closely allied with the issue of plot, as an attribute of it, is the issue of suspense.
If you cannot put down a novel, or if you sit on the edge of your theater seat, that is your emotional reaction to the fact that the story has suspense. Try to recall any story that held you in this manner. You will find that the story is one in which the author lets you in on his purpose.
In a suspenseful story, the events are constructed in such a manner that the reader has reason to wonder about the outcome. If an author tells you what is going to happen, the story will not hold your interest. But neither will you be interested if you do not know at all where the story is going—if it is a jumble of arbitrary events, or even if it has an inner logic which you discover later, but the author never showed you what to expect.
The archetype of a suspense scene is the one in Atlas Shrugged where Rearden enters Dagny’s apartment and meets Francisco. Why must this scene hold the reader’s interest? Because he has long been given grounds to wonder what