Robert L. Belknap's theory of plot illustrates the active and passive
roles literature plays in creating its own dynamic reading experience.
Literary narrative enchants us through its development of plot, but plot
tells its own story about the making of narrative, revealing through its
structures, preoccupations, and strategies of representation critical
details about how and when a work came into being.
Through a rich reading of Shakespeare's King Lear and Dostoevsky's Crime
and Punishment, Belknap explores the spatial, chronological, and causal
aspects of plot, its brilliant manipulation of reader frustration and
involvement, and its critical cohesion of characters. He considers
Shakespeare's transformation of dramatic plot through parallelism,
conflict, resolution, and recognition. He then follows with Dostoevsky's
development of the rhetorical and moral devices of nineteenth-century
Russian fiction, along with its epistolary and detective genres, to
embed the reader in the murder Raskolnikov commits. Dostoevsky's
reinvention of the psychological plot was profound, and Belknap
effectively challenges the idea that the author abused causality to
achieve his ideological conclusion. In a final chapter, Belknap argues
that plots teach us novelistic rather than poetic justice. Operating
according to their own logic, plots provide us with a compelling way to
see and order our world.
