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| The narrative presentation of necessary information about the character, setting, or character's history provided to make the reader care what happens to the characters in the story. |
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| The central problem in the story. The source of the tension between the protagonist and antagonist. |
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| The narrative's turning point in a struggle between opposing forces. The point of highest conflict in a story. |
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| The events following the climax and leading up to the resolution. These events reveal how the protagonist has beenimacted by and dealt with the preceding conflicts of the story. |
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| The period after the story's climax when conflicts are addressed and/ore resolved. Includes the falling action and resolution of a story. |
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| The depiction of human beings (and nonhumans) within a story. |
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| The artful arrangement of incidents in a story, with each incident building on the next in a series of causes and effects. |
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| The perspective from which the story is told to the reader. |
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| The time and place where the story occurs. Setting creates expectations for the types of characters and situations encoutered in the story. |
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| The central or underlying meanings of a literary work. |
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| A character's reason for doing something. |
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| The story is narrated by a charactger in the story, identified by use of the pronoun I or the plural first-person we. |
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| A third-person narrator who observes the thoughts and describes the actions of multiple characters in the story. The omniscient narrator can see beyond the physical actions and dialogue of characters and is able to reveal the inner thouts and emotions of anyone in the story. |
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| Limited Omniscient Narrator |
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| A third-person narrator who enters into the mind of only one character at a time. This narrator serves more as an interpreter than a souce of the main character's thoughts. |
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| The story is told by an observer who relates only facts, providing neither commentary nor insight into the character's thoughts or actions. |
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| A story in which major elements such as characters and settings represent universal truths or moral lessons in a one-to-one correspondence. |
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| Any object, image, character, or action that suggests meaning beyond the everyday literal level. |
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| The characteristic way in which any writer uses language. |
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| The author's attitude toward his or her characters or subject matter. |
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| A short narrative that illustrates a lesson using comparson to familiar characters and events. The characters and events in parables often have obvious significance as symbols and alllegories. |
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| A reference to another work of art or literature, or to a person, place, or event outside the text. |
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| A tone characterized by a distance between what occurs and what is expected to occur, or between what is said and what is meant. |
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| A long fictional work. Because of their greater length, novels are typically complex and may follow more than one chater or plot. |
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| A brief fictional narrative that attempts to dramatize or illustrate the effect or meaning of a single incident or small group of incidents in the life of a single character or small group of characters. |
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| The main figure (or principal actor) in a work of literature. A stroy's plot hinges equally on the protagonist's efforts to realize his or her desires and to cope with failure if and when plans are thwarted and desires left unfulfilled. |
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| A character in conflict with the protagonist. A story's plot often hinges on a protagonist's conflict with an antagonist. |
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| Latin for God from the machine; a literary device, often seen in drama, where a conflict is resolved by unforeseen and often far-fetched means. |
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| A sudden realization or new understanding achieved by a character or speaker. In many short stories, the character's epiphnay is the cliax of the story. |
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| The device of moving back in time to a point before the primary action of the story. |
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