What is a Narrative Arc in Cli-Fi? Transcript (English Subtitles Available in Video)
By Jackson Cooper and Nicole Nugent
MA Students in Literature & Culture
Nov 6, 2024
Let me tell you a quick story. We open on our main character, who has been ostracized by their community and claims they want nothing more than to remain alone. They are then forced by outside circumstances to interact with other characters and while they grow slowly attached to them, they constantly worry that these people might leave them too and they will be alone again. When confronted by an event that makes them realize that they want to be able to trust the people they have grown to care about, they begin to make decisions that lead them to end in a trusting relationship with others. Why might this sound familiar? One reason might be that it is the basic storyline for the movie Shrek, but another reason might be because it follows a standard narrative format that can be mapped onto many different kinds of narratives: A main character is confronted with some sort of change in their life; The change introduces problems that they must confront; the problems come to a head and change the main character in some form; and then this change is resolved in a way that concludes the story. This is what is known as a narrative arc. In David Turkel’s video on Narrative Arc, he tackles this idea from the perspective of creative writing, but in this video we will approach it from the perspective of literary criticism, to specifically address how narrative arcs may be altered in climate literature.
In the study of literature, we can often utilize a concept known as Freytag’s pyramid to map specific elements of the plot or narrative. Gustav Freytag, a 19th-century German writer, originally developed two pyramid models for the structure of either tragedies or comedies. Today, his idea has been more generalized, but the concept still bears his name. Let’s return to that story I told earlier, this time performing a close reading of the movie Shrek as our example, in order to explain this pyramid model of narrative.
The arc begins with exposition, or the introduction of the setting, the characters, and other information necessary to understand the rest of the story. The exposition of the movie introduces us to Shrek, our main character, an ogre who is hated by the townsfolk, and lives on his own in the swamp, where he enjoys being alone. The slope of the pyramid begins with an inciting incident that sets up the rising action of the arc. The inciting incident is something that interrupts the exposition with a conflict, something that thwarts, endangers or opposes a protagonist’s desires. When Lord Farquaad resettles all the fairytale creatures in his swamp, Shrek’s desire to protect himself through isolation from others is thwarted, setting up a conflict wherein Shrek’s desire is being opposed. The rising action then follows as tension begins to build within the narrative due to the introduction of the conflict. As he goes on quest to get his swamp back, things keep happening that thwart Shrek’s desire to be alone: Donkey accompanies him on his quest and Shrek finds himself falling for Fiona. The rising action tracks the tension up the slope, until it reaches a climax, the top of the pyramid. The climax is the moment of highest tension within the narrative arc, and this moment will eventually lead to the resolution of the conflict. The tension between Shrek’s desire to be alone to protect himself and his growing desire to be understood and loved by those around him comes to a climax when, after receiving the deed to his swamp and returning to his isolation, Shrek gets into a fight with Donkey about what Shrek truly wants. In this moment the tension is at its highest as everything that has gone unsaid in the movie up to this point is said, and Shrek comes to the realization that he doesn’t want to continue protecting himself if it thwarts his ability to give and receive love. This leads to the falling action, the descending slope of the pyramid, where he goes to stop Fiona’s marriage to Lord Farquaad, proclaims his love for her, and the narrative arc is resolved by their marriage at the end, where they are surrounded by all the fairytale creatures.
Using this pyramid model, a narrative conflict can be visually traced from its inception to its resolution, with a specific focus on the tension created by the conflict. It is striking how these 6 elements of a narrative arc are present in many different types of stories once they have been identified. Additionally, it is important to note that a single narrative arc can occur over the course of an entire story, or there can be multiple narrative arcs that occur throughout a longer work like a novel, movie, or TV series. The trick is to be able to first identify the conflict of the work, and then see how these other elements are present throughout. Being able to map this narrative arc allows us to make the argument that, rather than simply being a comedy, a parody of a fairy tale story, or even a love story, Shrek is fundamentally an exploration of the importance, even for an ogre, of having a community in order to live a fulfilling life.
There are many types of conflicts that are common in literature and other narrative works of art. A character might desire a marriage/partner and be challenged in some way on the path to achieving that desire; a character might feel the need to take the law into their own hands after seeing the inability of regular enforcers to stop crime; or a character may need to find a way to communicate with someone or something. These are all examples of central conflicts of narrative arcs that follow a marriage plot, occur within the western genre, or deal with themes of alien contact, and, in most cases, we can assume that the highest moment of tension will lead to a resolution that follows the model of Freytag’s pyramid.
However, in climate literature, this traditional model is often disrupted. For example, in the novel Weather, by Jenny O-fill, one of the conflicts that drives a major narrative arc in the work is the desire of the narrator to prepare herself and her family for the most catastrophic events that are predicted under climate change. The novel starts out with an introduction to Lizzie, a university librarian with a husband and a child, who begins to experience climate anxiety when her former professor asks her to help produce a climate podcast called “Hell and High Water.” Over the course of the novel, as she is forced to confront the troubling realities of climate change through her work on the podcast, the anxiety Lizzie feels about the state of the world builds steadily. She tries to manage it in a variety of increasingly extreme ways, going so far as to research how to become a climate doomsday prepper in an attempt to feel “ready” for the most severe effects of climate change.
However, what is interesting about the narrative arc of Weather is that there is no climax, no point of highest tension. Instead, it contains something called an anti-climax: a term for when, what should be the moment of highest tension, is undercut by an event that doesn’t live up to the high expectations that we are led to believe will lead to the resolution of the conflict. In Weather the reader begins to suspect that Lizzie will increasingly act out to resolve her anxiety: potentially by going off the grid entirely, having an affair while her husband and child are gone, or driving those she loves away; Lizzie doing SOMETHING is what might happen in a traditional narrative arc. What we get however, is Lizzie, somewhat undramatically, choosing to stop prepping, to not have an affair, and to simply accept her new reality of living in a climate changed world. This completely undermines the building tension in the novel, and leaves the reader somewhat disoriented at her shift to seeming acceptance of the threats that she faces.
Yet this anticlimax still DOES something for the story. The presence of the anticlimax might say something about what is possible for the individual to DO in the face of climate change, and what is worth being anxious about and what isn’t. This isn’t to say that the novel declares climate change isn’t something that should be addressed, but rather it questions the dramatic personal attempts that people make to solve a problem that can only be tackled collectively. This anti climax is easy to identify and name because we attempted to map the narrative onto our traditional model of the narrative arc. Being able to identify a narrative arc in the first place, allows us to see whether or not a specific narrative follows this model. This enables us to ask questions about the literary work to try to understand why an author might have made that particular choice, what this might say about the conflict that is being depicted, and what feelings or themes it allows the work to consider.
While an anti-climax isn’t something that every piece of climate literature will possess, it is striking that many plots centered around climate change do follow this anti-climax model. Let’s return to our original example to unpack some of these implications. How it might effect the audience if Shrek had ended with Donkey not getting into a fight with Shrek and we see Shrek remain in his swamp, and watch Fiona marry Lord Farquaad? Is it more satisfying to you when stories follow a traditional narrative arc, or when they deviate from it? Finally, Shrek is not a movie that deals with climate change. Do you consider the narrative structure of the anti-climax to be more suitable for plots that concern climate change than the traditional narrative arc outlined earlier in this video? Let us know in the comments section of the video!
Want to cite this?
MLA Citation: Cooper, Jackson and Nicole Nugent. "What is a Narrative Arc in Cli-Fi?" Oregon State Guide to Climate-Change Literature, edited by Rachael Garcia, 6 Nov. 2024, Oregon State University, liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-narrative-arc-cli-fi. Accessed [insert date].
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