when we say "novel", "story" or "pl

when we say "novel", "story" or "plot", we instinctively imply the idea of a unity. we imply that the parts, the various individual events, hang together. there is the matter of cause and effect. in any story we expect to find one thing bringing on another. if we can detect no reasonable connection between them, if there is no'logic' whatever,we lose interest. every story itself is a particular writer's way of saying how you can make sense of human experience.

cause and effect constitute one of the ways of saying this. in works of fiction, however, we cannot think of cause as a mechanical thing as though one event; that is, they involve human respones to changing situtations, including the possibility of action taken to change existing situtations.