understand a story would mean, ideally, knowing all its elements and how they function to form a whole. The concept of the unified action provides a key to three of the most important elements of the story: plot-
structure, theme, and unity. The first of these, plot- structure, is most important. To understand a story we must comprehend its plot above all. To comprehend the plot-structure of a story means to know what the main problem is, who the protagonist is, and what it is that he or she actively wants. It means to know what the resolution of the problem is and especially how this resolution is brought to pass.
Following Aristotle's lead, I have approached unified action in the simple yet very functional terms of beginning, middle, and end. Action begins with the introduction of an active problem through some sort of disturbance (e.g. a Green Knight). The attempts of the protagonist to solve the active problem constitute the action's middle, and the resolution of the problem
brings the action to an end. Thus, action is the
answer to perhaps the most fundamental question one can ask about a story: What is this story about?
Indeed, it is the answer to this ambiguous question in both its senses; it is both what a story
tells and what it has to say or, more often, what it has to ask. Theme, that is, what the story has to ask, the ideas that it explores, results from the active problem posed by the disturbance. Indeed, as the discussion in chapter I demonstrated, the range and direction of a story's themes are determined to a considerable extent by the conditions governing its situation. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that theme equals the sum of situation and active problem. In this way, understanding the plot-structure of a story means understanding its themes.
The unified action also provides a basis from which the entire structure of a long and complex story can be grasped. If we can identify the action, we can determine what parts of a story function within that action and which parts have functions elsewhere. This makes analysis of the story's total structure much easier and the principle(s) upon which it is unified much clearer.
Genette has sensibly warned against the temptation "to seek unity at any price and in that way to force the work's coherence" (266). Action provides a sound and sensible foundation for an unforced understanding of unity because it is undeniably unified through the plot structure. Aristotle took relevance to the action as the acid test for every episode's inclusion or
exclusion from a story. If many authors, such as
Kundera and Conrad, have found other, less exclusionary ways of unifying stories, action has nevertheless
tended to remain at the centre as a hub onto which episodes are fastened and upon which the story as a whole turns. It is in this sense that action can also be called the "soul" of a story.
The importance of the models of action and plot- structure as outlined in this thesis are their
applications to literary study in general. The plot- structure of many works is still frequently neglected as if it were too obvious to bear much thought or
perhaps too obvious to say much about. I have tried to | show, on the contrary, how plot-structure is a rather
complex subject, worthy of the most careful study in itself. In addition, an accurate grasp of a story's themes is virtually impossible without a clear
understanding of the structure of the story's action. Although much work in this area remains to be done, the analysis of action clearly has the potential for
providing a sophisticated and effective method or "approach" to stories in teaching and research.
Of course, such an approach would not have unlimited relevance to all fiction. The so-called
"minimalist" American fiction of the 1980s, and the older "slice-of-life" genre, to name but two instances, characteristically contain slight action if they
contain an action at all. In such cases a study based on action and plot-structure is not likely to yield many insights. Still, if the relevance of action as the basis for a critical approach is doubtful in the case of stories that eschew the "narrative core" of
action, so too is the extent to which fiction without action can be called a story. As I stated in my
introduction, the rather unassuming model of action established in this thesis cannot serve as a grand, general theory of literature but applies, rather, to those stories in which action and plot play the leading roles.
A more difficult and, indeed, fundamental problem with the concept of action is the structure of events— the subject of chapter II. According to Aristotle, events must be structured so as to exclude non-human causes, such as chance, if the plot is to achieve the greatest effects of which it is capable. In
Aristotle's view, as Halliwell explains, "it is the total coherence of a work . . . which will be disturbed by even a single chance event within the sequence of action" (Aristotle's 210).
The discussion has shown that coherence is indeed necessary so that the audience can perceive the
protagonist's own fallibility in bringing about the transformation of fortune. Yet, as any number of plot- structures demonstrate, coherence does not mandate the utter exclusion of the non-human cause from the action. An action with non-humanly caused events can be
coherent enough to bring about the release of powerful emotions as long as the essential fallibility of the protagonist is maintained. Utter lucidity is not an end in itself; rather, a certain degree of lucidity is necessary to create the conditions for fallibility. It
is only when the use of non-human causes eliminates these conditions that the ability to release is at risk.
My discussion of the causality problem above is an attempt to forge a kind of compromise between the human and non-human poles of causality in plot-structure by centring on fallibility. Yet this compromise leaves many of the most fundamental questions about action unanswered. The problem of causality raises questions which lie at the heart of plot-construction and perhaps even of story-telling itself— the "constitutive
questions" of fiction according to Kundera (Art 58); What are the causes of action? What makes the
revelation or concealment of causality emotionally compelling and why? In what precisely does the power of action to cause the release of emotions lie? To conclude, I would like to indicate a few of the
directions which further research into these questions might take.
I have claimed that the great advantage of
lucidity is that it allows for fallibility. However, Aristotle suggested, with characteristic insight, that the power of the lucid, unified action came precisely from the fact that it was more coherent, more lucid, and therefore more significant than the unorganised commotion of everyday life (Halliwell, Commentary 107). In other words, the lucid plot-structure seems to
possess remarkable force itself quite apart from fallibility.
To return briefly to the Reeve's Tale for an illustration, it is undeniably much funnier that the Miller's wife gets in bed with John because he moved the cradle to the foot of his bed than it would be if she got into the wrong bed accidentally, even though in either case she would still bring her fate down on
herself. Consequently, fallibility cannot be the decisive factor here. On the contrary, the humour seems to lie in the reader's very perception and understanding of the connections to previous events. The reader "sees" John moving the cradle, "sees" the wife groping for it and finding it at the foot of the wrong bed, and comprehends why she then gets into the wrong bed. For some reason we find this funny in a way we would not have had she made the mistake just by
chance. Thus, we are left with the question; What is so funny about seeing connections?
The explanations by Lessing and Dürrenmatt which I cited earlier are enlightening but still incomplete. They do not fully explain the effect of the lucid plot- structure on our emotions. Lessing and Dürrenmatt
claimed that lucidity of plot-structure allows the members of the audience to "identify", to see how the same fate could befall them, and certainly we are able to identify, to a degree, with the acts of John and Alayn and the miller's wife. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that a reader, especially a modern reader, of the Reeve's Tale could really feel that the same things might well happen to him or her. Considered