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44-25 One Protagonist – Two Plots

Here we go. I'm going to walk you through an idea that I find incredibly fascinating.

In the chapter, Brooks was making a point about the famous "recognition" scene in Great Expectations. This is the moment where Pip, the protagonist, finally figures out what is really going on. It comes late in the novel, when all the plot threads connect, and a number of elements in the story that had seemed random or just plain weird suddenly line up and become a coherent explanation of what Pip's life is really about. The moment is horrifying for Pip.

To put it simply, without giving too many spoilers: Pip has all along believed that he has "great expectations" because a strange rich woman near his home, Miss Havisham, has essentially made him her heir (he is unclear about the specifics and has been advised not to ask for details). He also believes that this deal might well include marriage to Estella, her adopted daughter, whom he is obsessed with. During the novel, Pip undertakes all kinds of education and training to try to become worthy of these great expectations, mostly becoming very miserable as a result.

The reader, however, has noted all kinds of strange moments in the novel that seem not to fit this simple storyline. There is Pip's encounter with the escaped convict, Magwitch, in the opening pages; Miss Havisham and Estella are both eerie, discomforting figures, ill-suited to a pleasant tale of rags to riches; Pip seems to see ghosts on his visit to their house; later, a succession of odd, threatening figures appear in his life with no clear explanation.

In Brooks's language, there is just too much plot stuff in Great Expectations for the reader to really believe in Pip's version of his own story. Excess elements keep popping up. So, at last, when a figure from Pip's past returns, and reveals what is really going on -- no, Miss Havisham is not the source of his money -- the reader feels a sense of relief, of clarity. Suddenly all those peculiar parts of the novel fall into place.

Brooks describes this plot twist as a collision between the "official" plot of Great Expectations and the "repressed" plot. In the official plot, Pip is meant to rise up in society and inherit Miss Havisham's wealth (and maybe also her daughter). Yes, he is surrounded by a strange cast of troubling, wounded, and sometimes grotesque figures. But he tells himself to ignore those warning signs. What he doesn't understand is that the repressed plot -- the truth about where his money is coming from and the explanation of how all these odd people know each other -- has been running alongside the "official" plot this whole time, appearing as hints and implications, just under the surface of hundreds of pages of drama, setting, and narration.

The moment where Magwitch, the convict from chapter one, returns to the story is the moment where the repressed plot steps into the light, and the official plot fades away.

The power of two plots

This description of Great Expectations changed everything for me. I now had much a deeper picture of plot in general. A novel like Great Expectations could have one protagonist, one storyline, but two plots: the protagonist's plot and the "real" plot.

As a novel's reader, we start off inhabiting the protagonist's plot: they tell us what is going on and they share what they believe is important. But evidence and hints pile up that something more is going on. Slowly we discover, alongside the protagonist, what is really at stake, something bigger and more significant -- that is in tension with that protagonist's own plot.

Plot makes sense to us, therefore, when it makes sense to someone in the story -- the protagonist. As readers, we feel the plot because our fictional representative in the story feels it. And as writers, we can write more compelling stories when we design the plot around our protagonist's changing sense of what is important,

 

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