What a Sequence Is Doing
Sequence directs attention
- Plot and the exposition that accompanies it focus readers' attention on the parts of the narrative that matter most to its development.
- Focus is the key word: what a sequence includes, it makes important.
- What it passes over quickly, it makes minor — whatever actually happened.
Explaining the function of a sequence means saying...
Naming it as a flashback identifies it; the function is what the reader now knows.
What the focus falls on
- The CED lists four targets: characters, their relationships, their roles in the narrative, and setting and the relationship between characters and setting.
- So when a sequence slows down, ask which of the four it is holding still to show you.
- The answer is usually the point of the sequence.
A change of pace in a narrative is evidence of where to look.
Three years in a sentence beside an afternoon over four pages is a choice.
Pace is evidence
- Three years in a sentence, one afternoon over four pages — that ratio is a choice.
- The slow part is where the text is asking you to look.
- You do not need to guess why: name what is in focus there, and the why follows.
What is this sequence holding still to show you?
Sort each slowed-down passage by the focus the CED names.
Select all the things the CED says plot and exposition focus attention on.
Other works are outside the text.
"Function" asks what a sequence does, not what it is. Saying a sequence is a flashback identifies it; explaining its function means saying what the reader now knows, and knows too early or too late, because it sits there.
A useful shape: placing X before Y means the reader meets Y already ____ Z.
That sentence is usually the whole answer to a function question.
"Function" means what it does here
- The objective says explain the function of a particular sequence.
- Function is not what the sequence is — it is what it does for the narrative at that point.
- A useful sentence shape: placing X before Y means the reader meets Y already knowing Z.
Put the sequence pass in order.
The last step is what turns an observation into a claim about function.
A sequence pass
- Mark where the pace changes. Name what is in focus there.
- Ask what the reader now knows that they would not know in a different order.
- That last sentence is usually the whole answer to a function question.
A story spends four pages on one afternoon in a kitchen and one sentence on the next three years. The focus is the relationship between characters and setting: the reader now knows that room in a way no summary could deliver, so when the house is sold in the closing line, the loss is already furnished.
Plot and exposition focus readers' attention on what matters most — characters, their relationships and roles, setting, and the relationship between characters and setting. Pace is evidence: the slow part is where to look. Function = what the sequence does for the narrative at that point.