nearer and nearer to the other, until they meet
and blend.

A type of plot more elaborate than this may be devised by leading up
to the culmination along three or more distinct lines of causation,
instead of merely two. In the "Tale of Two Cities," Sydney Carton's
voluntary death upon the scaffold stands at the apex of several series
of events. And a plot may be still further complicated by tying the
strands together at other points beside the culmination. In "The
Merchant of Venice," the two chief series of events are firmly knotted
in the trial scene, when Shylock is circumvented by Portia; but they
are also tied together, though less firmly, at the very outset of
the play, when Antonio borrows from Shylock the money which makes it
possible for Bassanio to woo and win the Lady of Belmont. Furthermore,
any event in one of the main strands of causation may stand at the
culmination of a minor strand, and thus may form a little knot in the
general network of the plot. In the same play, the minor strand of the
elopement of Lorenzo and Jessica attains its culmination in a scene
which stands only midway along the progress of the two main strands,
that of the bond and that of the caskets, toward their common result
in the defeat of Shylock.

But however intricately woven a plot may be, and however many minor
knots may tie together the various strands which enter into it, there
is almost always one point of greatest complication, one big knot
which ties together all the strands at once, and stands as the common
culmination of all the series, major and minor. The story concerns
itself chiefly with telling the reader how the major knot came to be
tied; but in a plot of any complexity, the reader naturally desires
to be told how the knot became untied again. Therefore this point
of greatest complication, this culmination of all the strands of
causation which are woven in the plot, this objective point of the
entire narrative, is seldom set at the very end of a story, but
usually at a point about three quarters of the way from the beginning
to the end. The first three quarters of the story, speaking roughly,
exhibit the antecedent causes of the major knot; and the last quarter
of the story exhibits its subsequent effects. A plot, therefore, in
its general aspects, may be figured as a complication followed by an
explication, a tying followed by an untying, or (to say the same
thing in French words which are perhaps more connotat