structures, according
to whichever section of the entire story happens most to interest his
mind.

It will be seen, also, that much of the entire story must, in any
case, remain unwritten. A plot is not only, as Stevenson stated, a
simplification of life; it is also a further simplification of the
train of events which, in simplifying life, the novelist has first
imagined. The entire story, with all its implications, is selected
from life; and the plot is then selected from the entire story. Often
a novelist may suggest as much through deliberately omitting from
his plot certain events in his imagined story as he could suggest
by representing them. Perhaps the most powerful character in Mr.
Meredith's "Evan Harrington" is the great Mel, whose death is
announced in the very first sentence of the novel. Hawthorne, in
"The Marble Faun," never clears away the mystery of Miriam's shadowy
pursuer, nor tells us what became of Hilda when she disappeared for a
time from the sight and knowledge of her friends.

After the novelist has selected from his entire story the materials he
means to represent, and has patterned these materials into a plot,
he enjoys considerable liberty in regard to the point at which he
may commence his narrative. He may begin at the beginning of one or
another of his main strands of causation, as Scott usually does; or
he may adopt the Homeric device, commended by Horace, of plunging into
the midst of his plot and working his way back only afterward to its
beginning. In the first chapter of "Pendennis," the hero is seventeen
years old; the second chapter narrates the marriage of his father and
mother, and his own birth and boyhood; and at the outset of the third
chapter he is only sixteen years of age.

It is obvious that, so long as the novelist represents his events in
logical sequence, it is not at all necessary that he should present
them in chronological succession. Stories may be told backward through
time as well as forward. Thackeray often begins a chapter with an
event that happened one day, and ends it with an event that happened
several days before; he works his way backward from effects to causes,
instead of forward from causes to effects. In carrying on a plot
which is woven out of several strands, it is hardly ever possible to
represent events in uninterrupted chronological succession, even when
the author consistently works forward from causes to effects; for
after he has pursued one s