A plot twist is a literary technique that introduces a radical change in the direction or expected outcome of the plot in a work of fiction. When it happens near the end of a story, it is known as a twist ending or surprise ending . It may change the audience's perception of the preceding events, or introduce a new conflict that places it in a different context. A plot twist may be foreshadowed , to prepare the audience to accept it, but it usually comes with some element of surprise. There are various methods used to execute a plot twist, such as withholding information from the audience, or misleading them with ambiguous or false information. Not every plot has a twist, but some have multiple lesser ones, and some are defined by a single major twist.
47-550: Charles Kinbote is a fictional character who acts as the unreliable narrator in Vladimir Nabokov 's novel Pale Fire . Kinbote appears to be the scholarly author of the Foreword, Commentary and Index surrounding the text of the late John Shade 's poem "Pale Fire", which together form the text of Nabokov's novel. In the course of initially academic but increasingly deranged annotations to Shade's text, Kinbote's writing reveals
94-403: A Russian and a madman ..." Unreliable narrator In literature , film , and other such arts , an unreliable narrator is a narrator who cannot be trusted, one whose credibility is compromised. They can be found in fiction and film, and range from children to mature characters. While unreliable narrators are almost by definition first-person narrators , arguments have been made for
141-408: A character, with clues to the character's unreliability. A more dramatic use of the device delays the revelation until near the story's end. In some cases, the reader discovers that in the foregoing narrative, the narrator had concealed or greatly misrepresented vital pieces of information. Such a twist ending forces readers to reconsider their point of view and experience of the story. In some cases
188-416: A comic melange of narcissism and megalomania : he believes himself to be a royal figure, the exiled king of Zembla and the real target of the gunman who has in fact murdered Shade. Using the scholarly apparatus of reference and commentary, Kinbote first intertwines his own story with the commentary on Shade's poem, then allows the poem to slide into the background and his perhaps delusional world to move into
235-483: A form of false foreshadowing . A false protagonist is a character presented at the start of the story as the main character, but then disposed of, usually killed to emphasize that they will not return. An example is Psycho ' s Marion Crane (portrayed by Janet Leigh ), who is brutally murdered about halfway through the film. Another instance is the film Executive Decision , in which the special-forces team leader, played by highly-billed action star Steven Seagal ,
282-456: A model of five criteria ('integrating mechanisms') which determine if a narrator is unreliable. Instead of relying on the device of the implied author and a text-centered analysis of unreliable narration, Ansgar Nünning gives evidence that narrative unreliability can be reconceptualized in the context of frame theory and of readers' cognitive strategies. ... to determine a narrator's unreliability one need not rely merely on intuitive judgments. It
329-402: A number of signs that constitute or at least hint at a narrator's unreliability. Nünning has suggested to divide these signals into three broad categories. Twist ending Since the effectiveness of a plot twist usually relies on the audience's not having expected it, revealing a plot twist to readers or viewers in advance is commonly regarded as a spoiler . Even revealing the fact that
376-405: A past event, surprises the reader with previously unknown information that solves a mystery, places a character in a different light, or reveals the reason for a previously inexplicable action. The Alfred Hitchcock film Marnie employed this type of surprise ending. Sometimes this is combined with the above category, as the flashback may reveal the true identity of one of the characters, or that
423-587: A similar approach; it begins with the main protagonist, Aeneas , telling stories about the end of the Trojan War and the first half of his journey to Dido , queen of Carthage . The nonlinear approach has been used in works such as the films Mulholland Drive , Sin City , Saw IV , Premonition , Arrival , Pulp Fiction , Memento , Babel , the television shows Lost , How to Get Away with Murder , How I Met Your Mother (especially in many episodes in
470-411: A work contains plot twists – especially at the ending – can also be controversial, as it changes the audience's expectations. However, at least one study suggests that this does not affect the enjoyment of a work. Many television series, especially in crime fiction , use plot twists as a theme in every episode and some base their whole premise on the twist; for example, The Twilight Zone and Tales of
517-501: Is a sudden reversal of the protagonist's fortune, whether for good or ill, that emerges naturally from the character's circumstances. Unlike the deus ex machina device, peripeteia must be logical within the frame of the story. An example of a reversal for ill would be Agamemnon 's sudden murder at the hands of his wife Clytemnestra in Aeschylus ' The Oresteia or the inescapable situation Kate Hudson 's character finds herself in at
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#1733085017453564-542: Is his father Anakin, with the revelation eventually being fully dealt with and resolved in Return of the Jedi (1983). An unreliable narrator twists the ending by revealing, almost always at the end of the narrative, that the narrator has manipulated or fabricated the preceding story, thus forcing the reader to question his or her prior assumptions about the text. This motif is often used within noir fiction and films , notably in
611-416: Is hoped to incentivize the audience to return to see how the characters resolve the dilemma. A notable example is in the 1980 Star Wars film The Empire Strikes Back where protagonist Luke Skywalker who initially believed that the antagonist Darth Vader had killed his father, Anakin after Obi-Wan Kenobi told it to him in A New Hope is shocked and horrified when the latter tells him that he himself
658-600: Is killed shortly after the mission begins. The character of Casey Becker (played by then A-list actress Drew Barrymore ) in Scream is killed in the first fifteen minutes. An example in literature and television is Ned Stark in the Game of Thrones franchise , who is killed before the end of the first book/season, despite receiving the most focus of the ensemble of characters. A non-linear narrative works by revealing plot and character in non-chronological order. This technique requires
705-409: Is neither the reader's intuitions nor the implied author's norms and values that provide the clue to a narrator's unreliability, but a broad range of definable signals. These include both textual data and the reader's preexisting conceptual knowledge of the world. In sum whether a narrator is called unreliable or not does not depend on the distance between the norms and values of the narrator and those of
752-461: Is revealed to have a dissociative identity disorder , and is not executed on plea of insanity. Near the end, Aaron's lawyer discovers that he feigned his insanity to avoid the death penalty. Agatha Christie's classic And Then There Were None is another famous example and includes the term as well in a murder ploy where the intended victims are made to guess that one of them will be killed through an act of treachery. The complete second timeline of
799-399: Is sometimes applied to films (such as the aforementioned Brazil and Shutter Island ) which do not feature any voice-over narration in a conventional sense, but whose protagonists are still considered "narrators" in the sense that the film is presented from their perspective and the audience mainly encounters the narrative and diegesis through that character's point of view. Peripeteia
846-418: Is the most common kind of unreliable narration. Riggan provides the following definitions and examples to illustrate his classifications: It remains a matter of debate whether and how a non-first-person narrator can be unreliable, though the deliberate restriction of information to the audience can provide instances of unreliable narrative , even if not necessarily of an unreliable narrator . For example, in
893-643: The Terry Gilliam film Brazil , Chuck Palahniuk 's Fight Club (and David Fincher 's film adaptation ), Gene Wolfe 's novel Book of the New Sun , the second episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents , Premonition , the 1920 German silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari , Iain Pears 's An Instance of the Fingerpost , Shutter Island and Kim Newman 's Life's Lottery . The term "unreliable narrator"
940-469: The Blue" (in which she classed Pale Fire "one of the great works of art of the century") identified the book's author as Professor V. Botkin. Nabokov himself endorsed this reading, including in a list of possible interview-answers at the end of his 1962 diary, "I wonder if any reader will notice the following details: 1) that the nasty commentator is not an ex-king and not even Dr. Kinbote, but Prof. Vseslav Botkin,
987-545: The Unexpected . An early example of the romance genre with multiple twists was the Arabian Nights tale " The Three Apples ". It begins with a fisherman discovering a locked chest. The first twist occurs when the chest is broken open and a corpse is found inside. The initial search for the murderer fails, and a twist occurs when two men appear, separately claiming to be the murderer. A complex chain of events finally reveals
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#17330850174531034-528: The audience into suspecting them. In the bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code , the misdeeds of a key character named "Bishop Aringarosa" draw attention away from the true master villain ("Aringarosa" literally translates as "pink herring"). In the William Diehl novel Primal Fear (also adapted into a film ), a defendant named Aaron Stampler is accused of brutally murdering the Archbishop of Chicago. He
1081-419: The device of unreliability can best be considered along a spectrum of fallibility that begins with trustworthiness and ends with unreliability. This model allows for all shades of grey in between the poles of trustworthiness and unreliability. It is consequently up to each individual reader to determine the credibility of a narrator in a fictional text. Whichever definition of unreliability one follows, there are
1128-466: The end of The Skeleton Key . This type of ending was a common twist ending utilised by The Twilight Zone , most effectively in the episode " Time Enough at Last " where Burgess Meredith 's character is robbed of all his hope by a simple but devastating accident with his eyeglasses. A positive reversal of fortune would be Nicholas Van Orton's suicide attempt after mistakenly believing himself to have accidentally killed his brother, only to land safely in
1175-437: The existence of unreliable second- and third-person narrators , especially within the context of film and television, but sometimes also in literature. The term “unreliable narrator” was coined by Wayne C. Booth in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction . James Phelan expands on Booth’s concept by offering the term “bonding unreliability” to describe situations in which the unreliable narration ultimately serves to approach
1222-505: The film The Usual Suspects . An unreliable narrator motif was employed by Agatha Christie in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd , a novel that generated much controversy due to critics' contention that it was unfair to trick the reader in such a manipulative manner. Another example of unreliable narration is a character who has been revealed to be insane and thus causes the audience to question the previous narrative; notable examples of this are in
1269-717: The implied author but between the distance that separates the narrator's view of the world from the reader's world-model and standards of normality. Unreliable narration in this view becomes purely a reader's strategy of making sense of a text, i.e., of reconciling discrepancies in the narrator's account (c.f. signals of unreliable narration ). Nünning thus effectively eliminates the reliance on value judgments and moral codes which are always tainted by personal outlook and taste. Greta Olson recently debated both Nünning's and Booth's models, revealing discrepancies in their respective views. Booth's text-immanent model of narrator unreliability has been criticized by Ansgar Nünning for disregarding
1316-435: The issues of truth in fiction, bringing forward four types of audience who serve as receptors of any given literary work: Rabinowitz suggests that "In the proper reading of a novel, then, events which are portrayed must be treated as both 'true' and 'untrue' at the same time. Although there are many ways to understand this duality, I propose to analyze the four audiences which it generates." Similarly, Tamar Yacobi has proposed
1363-410: The later seasons), Heroes , Westworld , the book Catch-22 , and WandaVision . Reverse chronology works by revealing the plot in reverse order, i.e., from final event to initial event. Unlike chronological storylines, which progress through causes before reaching a final effect, reverse chronological storylines reveal the final effect before tracing the causes leading up to it; therefore,
1410-424: The midst of his own birthday party, in the film The Game . Deus ex machina is a Latin term meaning "god from the machine." It refers to an unexpected, artificial or improbable character, device or event introduced suddenly in a work of fiction to resolve a situation or untangle a plot. In Ancient Greek theater , the "deus ex machina" ('ἀπὸ μηχανῆς θεός') was the character of a Greek god literally brought onto
1457-568: The murderer to be the investigator's own slave. Literary analysts have identified several common categories of plot twists, based on how they are executed. Anagnorisis , or discovery, is the protagonist's sudden recognition of his or her own or another character's true identity or nature. Through this technique, previously unforeseen character information is revealed. A notable example of anagnorisis occurs in Oedipus Rex : Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother in ignorance, learning
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1504-439: The narrative audience – that is, one whose statements are untrue not by the standards of the real world or of the authorial audience but by the standards of his own narrative audience. ... In other words, all fictional narrators are false in that they are imitations. But some are imitations who tell the truth, some of people who lie. Rabinowitz's main focus is the status of fictional discourse in opposition to factuality. He debates
1551-450: The narrative, such as norms and ethics, which must necessarily be tainted by personal opinion. He consequently modified the approach to unreliable narration. There are unreliable narrators (c.f. Booth). An unreliable narrator however, is not simply a narrator who 'does not tell the truth' – what fictional narrator ever tells the literal truth? Rather an unreliable narrator is one who tells lies, conceals information, misjudges with respect to
1598-420: The narrator to the work’s envisioned audience, creating a bonding communication between the implied author and this “authorial audience.” Sometimes the narrator's unreliability is made immediately evident. For instance, a story may open with the narrator making a plainly false or delusional claim or admitting to being severely mentally ill, or the story itself may have a frame in which the narrator appears as
1645-414: The narrator's unreliability is never fully revealed but only hinted at, leaving readers to wonder how much the narrator should be trusted and how the story should be interpreted. ==Classification== :)))) Attempts have been made at a classification of unreliable narrators. William Riggan analysed in a 1981 study four discernible types of unreliable narrators, focusing on the first-person narrator as this
1692-541: The protagonist is related to one of the villain's past victims, as Sergio Leone did with Charles Bronson 's character in Once Upon a Time in the West or Frederick Forsyth 's The Odessa File . A cliffhanger or cliffhanger ending, is a plot device in fiction which features a main character in a precarious or difficult dilemma or confronted with a shocking revelation at the end of an episode of serialized fiction. A cliffhanger
1739-492: The reader to attempt to piece together the timeline in order to fully understand the story. A twist ending can occur as the result of information that is held until the climax and which places characters or events in a different perspective. Some of the earliest known uses of non-linear story telling occur in The Odyssey , a work that is largely told in flashback via the narrator Odysseus . The Aeneid , another epic poem , uses
1786-715: The reader's role in the perception of reliability and for relying on the insufficiently defined concept of the implied author. Nünning updates Booth's work with a cognitive theory of unreliability that rests on the reader's values and her sense that a discrepancy exists between the narrator's statements and perceptions and other information given by the text. and offers "an update of Booth's model by making his implicit differentiation between fallible and untrustworthy narrators explicit". Olson then argues "that these two types of narrators elicit different responses in readers and are best described using scales for fallibility and untrustworthiness." She proffers that all fictional texts that employ
1833-510: The sixth season of the television series Lost is a red herring: initially, this second timeline seems to be an alternate timeline in which Oceanic 815 never crashes (the main timeline revolves around the crashing of such plane on an island ). However, one of the last scenes reveals that this timeline is "a place" where the characters of the series meet after they have died, similar to the Bardo or Limbo concept. A red herring can also be used as
1880-438: The spotlight; as Kinbote had hoped John Shade would produce a poem about Zembla's exiled king, this shift provides some satisfaction for Kinbote. Kinbote's "distant northern land" may or may not exist in the world of the novel. In one interpretation, Kinbote is in fact a failed Eastern European academic probably named Vseslav Botkin, teaching at the same university as Shade. Botkin is desperate for recognition, ridiculed by most of
1927-403: The staff. Shade alone feels pity for him, and occasionally indulges Kinbote in long walks around New Wye, the college town where they live. The reflexive structure of the novel, in which neither Kinbote nor Shade can really have the last word, together with apparent allusions to Kinbote's story in the poem, allow critics to argue various theories of authorship for Pale Fire as a whole, including
Charles Kinbote - Misplaced Pages Continue
1974-404: The stage via a crane (μηχανῆς— mechanes ), after which a seemingly insoluble problem is brought to a satisfactory resolution by the god's will. The term is now used pejoratively for any improbable or unexpected contrivance by which an author resolves the complications of the plot in a play or novel, and which has not been convincingly prepared for in the preceding action; the discovery of a lost will
2021-454: The theory that Shade invented Kinbote and wrote the commentary himself, and the contrasting theory that Kinbote invented Shade. Brian Boyd 's book Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery thoroughly explores the authorship and interpretive options, eventually settling on a thesis involving intervention in the text by both Shade and his daughter Hazel after their respective deaths. Mary McCarthy , in her 1962 New Republic essay "A Bolt from
2068-519: The three interweaving plays of Alan Ayckbourn 's The Norman Conquests , each confines the action to one of three locations during the course of a weekend. Kathleen Wall argues that in The Remains of the Day , for the "unreliability" of the main character (Mr Stevens) as a narrator to work, we need to believe that he describes events reliably, while interpreting them in an unreliable way. Wayne C. Booth
2115-425: The truth only toward the climax of the play. The earliest use of this device as a twist ending in a murder mystery was in " The Three Apples ", a medieval Arabian Nights tale, where the protagonist Ja'far ibn Yahya discovers by chance a key item towards the end of the story that reveals the culprit behind the murder to have been his own slave all along. Flashback , or analepsis, a sudden, vivid reversion to
2162-602: Was a favorite resort of Victorian novelists. A red herring is a false clue intended to lead investigators toward an incorrect solution. This device usually appears in detective novels and mystery fiction . The red herring is a type of misdirection , a device intended to distract the protagonist , and by extension the reader, away from the correct answer or from the site of pertinent clues or action. The Indian murder mystery film Gupt: The Hidden Truth cast many veteran actors who had usually played villainous roles in previous Indian films as red herrings in this film to deceive
2209-542: Was among the first critics to formulate a reader-centered approach to unreliable narration and to distinguish between a reliable and unreliable narrator on the grounds of whether the narrator's speech violates or conforms with general norms and values. He writes, "I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author 's norms), unreliable when he does not." Peter J. Rabinowitz criticized Booth's definition for relying too much on facts external to
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