The aspects that make up a story can be categorized into five basic and important elements. These components work to ensure that a story not only runs smoothly but also develop logically in a way that allows the reader to follow easily. The elements are outlined below:
Characters.
These are fictitious are real-life individuals that the author introduces to the story. The story tends to be centered on them. The author is tasked with giving sufficient information about the characters such that the reader is able to visualize them. There can be the main character and the supporting characters who help build the story (Fauzan, 2016) .
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Setting.
This is the location in which the happenings of the story unfold. Just like the characters, the author is tasked with describing the environment until a reader is able to visualize it.
Plot.
This is the actual storyline. It is the flow of events from the beginning to the end. It is necessary the plot has three parts, the beginning, the middle, and the end.
Conflict.
The plot is centered on this. Conflicts form the basic idea of stories (Reid, 2017) . Each story has a conflict that is to be solved by the time it ends.
Resolution
This is the solution to the conflict in the story. It usually comes at the end of the story. Usually, one of the key characters of the main focus groups has to compromise for the conflict to be resolved.
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is about a man who is too radical to change his beliefs. Not wanting to be as ‘weak’ as his father, Okonkwo seeks to fight Christianity which had been introduced by missionaries into Igbo seven years after he had been exiled from the place. Upon returning to Igbo, his attempt to fight Christianity gets him jailed by the missionaries. Feeling devastated, Okonkwo ends up hanging himself.
Based on Achebe’s novel, it can be concluded that novels and short stories share the same elements. In fact, they fall under the same category of writing referred to as prose writing. This form of writing adopts narrative writing as its basis.
References
Fauzan, U. (2016). Structural Analysis of “Peanut & Sparky”: A Short Story by Arnie Lightning as A Way in Understanding Literature. Journal of English Language Teaching and Linguistics , 1 (1), 39-50.
Reid, I. (2017). The short story (Vol. 34). Routledge.
