Chapter 12: Study Project on Structure

Stories are filled with—in fact produced through—structure.  Structure refers to the ways stories organize meaning.  All stories are organized by narrative: the common cultural sense of what constitutes a story in the first place.  But in addition, stories have their own structures by which they assemble their various elements in relation to one another and to larger meanings.

All of the elements of prose fiction are a part of a story's structures.  Identifying these structures, therefore, is a matter of seeing what principles—usually themes, images, motifs—bring the story's other elements—plot, character, setting, style, tone—together.  Very often, a story's structure consists of pairs of binary oppositions: two choices, two points-of-view, two worlds.  These pairs "line up" other elements, which may reinforce the oppositions, or provide a third term or synthesis that resolves the conflict of the two.

Identifying the structure of a story obviously means looking at the entire story and considering what kinds of conflicts, oppositions, categories, and juxtapositions organize its elements. This generally means accomplishing four analyses:

1. What are the story's motifs?
2. Do those motifs either
   1.  suggest particular oppositions, or
   2.  contain oppositions?
3. What events are repeated in the plot?
4. What issues, themes, or questions are repeated in these events?

1. and 2.

Motifs and Structure

Using as an example, Hanif Kureishi's "Blue, Blue Pictures of You," identify the story's motifs.  Do those motifs suggest various conflicts or alternative choices?  What oppositions are repeated?

Routine Studion Family Art Control

Chaos Pub Brian Sex Desire

Although several of these are not themselves necessarily chaotic (such as the Eshan's time in the Pub), the Pub becomes chaotic or free in contrast to the studio or the family.

In what ways do the story's images align with these oppositions?

In what ways do they collapse them?

What do these oppositions suggest about what Eshan might really want?

3. and 4.

Plot and Structure

Map the story's plot.  What events or actions are repeated?

Narrator wants to write book on sex.
Eshan takes pictures of sex.

Eshan alternates between routine (work, studio) habit and serendipity (Pub).
Eshan goes between family and friend, Brian.

Eshan photographs artists.
Eshan wants to be considered an artist.

Eshan destroys his routine.
Laura destroys the photographs.

How do such elements as plot and character fit in with these series of oppositions?

In what ways does the frame narrator fit into these oppositions?

Does any element or act dissolve or synthesize these oppositions?  The burning photographs?  The destruction of routine?

Putting It All Together

As one begins to discern the elements of a stories structure, one might see the terms of the story's conflict.  In "Blue, Blue Pictures" the conflict, which repeated on a number of levels, seems to be between discipline, routine, habit, safety on one side and freedom, creativity, love, serendipity on the other.  How can one be an artist in a controlled environment?   Choosing one side over the other somehow seems tragic at the end.  Is Eshan better off at the end?  Is a balance, such as he had at the beginning, the answer to this dilemma?

Considering also that this is a story within a story, is Eshan's story a sex story?  What kind of sex story is it?  Does telling a story about an ephemeral affair make it last? (Just as does taking photographs of it capture it?)

And what about the story we have before us?

What we might see is that this story oscillates between art as ephemeral and art as a making permanent, an oscillation that repeats the terms—art, habit—that structure the story itself.