Identify and describe how plot orders events in a narrative

Historical Context & Motivation

The question of how stories organize time is as old as storytelling itself, yet it was not until classical antiquity that thinkers began to formalize what distinguishes a plot from a mere sequence of happenings. In the Poetics, Aristotle argued that a well-constructed tragedy must possess a beginning, middle, and end arranged not merely by temporal succession but by causal necessity—each event following logically from what precedes it. This insistence on causal ordering rather than chronological cataloguing established the foundational distinction between story (the raw events) and plot (the artful arrangement of those events). That distinction has animated narrative theory across two millennia, from medieval romances to the modernist experiments of the twentieth century.

This rich tradition leaves AP students with a deceptively simple question: if every story involves events unfolding in time, what difference does it make how an author chooses to order them? The answer, as we shall see, is that the arrangement of events is itself an argument—a set of choices that controls suspense, shapes thematic emphasis, modulates a reader's sympathies, and ultimately constructs the meaning of the narrative.

Core Principles & Definitions

Before we can identify how plot orders events, we need a precise vocabulary. The most consequential distinction in narrative theory is the one between story (sometimes called fabula) and plot (sometimes called sjuzhet). Story refers to all the events of the narrative reconstructed in strict chronological order, while plot refers to the particular sequence in which the author actually presents those events to the reader. An author who begins a short story at the midpoint of the chronological story, then loops back to the origin before leaping forward to the conclusion, has crafted a plot that deliberately reorders events for artistic effect.

Visualizing Plot Structure

The following diagram illustrates how a single chronological story—events A through F—can be reordered into multiple plot configurations, each producing a different reading experience. The top row shows the story's events in their natural temporal sequence, while the lower rows show three common plot arrangements: linear chronological, in medias res with flashback, and reverse chronology. Notice how the same events, resequenced, create entirely different patterns of revelation and suspense.

What the diagram makes visible is a principle that can otherwise seem abstract: the gap between story-order and plot-order is the space where an author generates effects. When a reader encounters Plot 2, the opening event D raises questions—Who are these characters? How did they arrive at this moment?—that the subsequent flashbacks to A and B answer. That pattern of question-and-answer is the engine of narrative suspense and is entirely a product of plot ordering, not of the events themselves. Similarly, Plot 3's reverse chronology converts what would be rising tension in a linear telling into a progressive excavation of causes, an effect particularly powerful in stories that explore trauma, memory, or moral complexity.

Temporal Mechanics of Plot

The narratologist Gérard Genette provided the most systematic framework for analyzing temporal manipulation in narrative, identifying three axes along which an author can shape plot. While Genette's terminology can seem formidable, the underlying concepts are intuitive and exceptionally useful for AP literary analysis. The three axes are order, duration, and frequency.

Order: Analepsis and Prolepsis

Order refers to the relationship between the chronological sequence of events in the story and the sequence in which they appear in the plot. When the plot departs from chronological order, the result is anachrony. The two fundamental types of anachrony are analepsis (commonly called flashback), which narrates an event that occurred earlier than the present point in the plot, and prolepsis (commonly called flash-forward or foreshadowing), which narrates an event that will occur later. In William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," for instance, the plot jumps repeatedly between different periods of Emily Grierson's life, producing a fractured chronology whose very disorder mirrors the town's confused, collective memory. The reader must reconstruct the story's linear timeline from the plot's disordered presentation, and the effort of that reconstruction is itself thematically meaningful.

Duration: Stretch, Scene, Summary, Ellipsis, Pause

Duration concerns the ratio between how long an event takes in the story world and how much textual space it receives in the plot. A five-minute conversation might consume three pages of dialogue (a scene), while twenty years of a character's life might be compressed into a single sentence (a summary). An ellipsis skips over story time entirely, while a pause halts story time altogether for description or reflection. The relative duration the author assigns to events signals their thematic weight: lingering over a moment expands its significance, while compressing years into a phrase marginalizes them.

Frequency: Singulative, Repetitive, Iterative

Frequency addresses how many times the plot narrates a given event. Singulative narration tells once what happened once—the default mode. Repetitive narration tells multiple times what happened once, often from different perspectives or with accumulating detail, as in Akutagawa's "In a Bamboo Grove" (the basis for Kurosawa's Rashomon). Iterative narration tells once what happened many times, as in 'Every morning she walked to the river'—a device that compresses habitual action and often conveys routine, tedium, or inevitability.

Common Plot Ordering Patterns in Short Fiction

Short fiction, constrained by its brevity, tends to deploy certain plot-ordering patterns with particular frequency and intensity. Unlike the novel, which can sustain extended temporal experiments across hundreds of pages, the short story must accomplish its temporal manipulations swiftly and decisively. The following table catalogs the most common patterns, their defining features, canonical examples, and the effects they typically produce. When you encounter these patterns on the AP exam, your task is not merely to identify them but to explain how they contribute to the text's meaning.

Worked Example: Analyzing Plot Order in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"

William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" (1930) is one of the most frequently taught short stories for its masterful manipulation of temporal order. The plot does not proceed chronologically; instead, it moves through five sections that jump forward and backward through Emily Grierson's life. The following worked example demonstrates how to analyze its plot ordering systematically—the kind of analysis you would produce in a prose analysis FRQ.

Strengths and Limitations of Different Plot Orders

Each plot-ordering strategy carries distinctive advantages and risks. Strong literary analysis on the AP exam requires you to evaluate not just what an ordering does, but what it sacrifices—what alternative effects it forecloses. The table below maps the primary strengths and limitations of the six ordering patterns introduced in Section 5.

Connecting to Advanced Narrative Theory

The concepts covered in this lesson correspond to foundational narratology, but they open onto several more advanced theoretical frameworks that enrich close reading. The table below situates our core concepts alongside their more sophisticated counterparts, giving you a map of where this knowledge leads in college-level literary study.

For AP purposes, you do not need to master these advanced frameworks, but awareness of them deepens your analytical repertoire. If you can gesture toward the idea that a story's temporal disorder enacts something thematic—that Faulkner's fragmented chronology doesn't just confuse but performs the Southern community's dysfunctional relationship to the past, for instance—you are already doing the kind of sophisticated structural analysis that distinguishes essays scoring in the upper range.

Practice Problems

Summary