There is an element of surprise for the shoemaker at the end. How does the narrator build this surprise?Is it sudden? From the story shoemaker
Answers
Answer:The importance of surprising your readers should never be forgotten by any aspiring writer. In fact, it should always be considered a vital part of a storyteller’s toolkit. By seeking to confound your audience with plot twists, subverting the reader’s expectations with ‘the element of surprise’ can often allow you to heighten dramatic tension in your story, add suspense, or introduce humour.
To understand how you can use it, we should start with a simple definition: the element of surprise is best described as the occurrence of anything in your story which is deemed by the reader to be unexpected. There are many subtle ways to achieve this—from character interplay and dialogue, all the way to the actual detailing of events within the story—but one of the most significant from a storytelling perspective is known as peripeteia.
Peripeteia—meaning ‘to fall around’ or ‘to change suddenly’—was defined by Aristotle as describing “a change by which the action veers round to its opposite, subject always to our rule of probability or necessity.” In other words, it is a means of presenting the reader with a plot device which completely defies a reader’s expectations. That’s the essence of what the element of surprise tends to consist of in works of literature.
There are, however, many ways writers can achieve this, through the use of plot points for example, so here’s a handful to give you some thought-starters.
1. Identity
Let’s say there is a plot twist regarding the identity of one of your characters, such as a character not turning out to be who they appear to be, for example. Perhaps they are posing as someone else (as seen in Twelfth Night), or maybe they are thinking one way through prose, but behaving another way through dialogue, deceiving themselves more than anyone else. It should also be said that the literary technique of the unreliable narrator—exposing before the reader a gulf between what is said and what is actually done—can also have surprising consequences on how the reader interprets the story through the manner in which the narrator comes across.
Alternatively, there could even be the discovery that someone is not who they say they are at all; an unmasking, of sorts, culminating in them perhaps unwittingly revealing their true identity. A character could end up being a completely different person altogether or, depending on your genre, even a shapeshifting monster. Any reasonable person would say this constitutes a surprise.
Explanation: