AP English Literature and Composition

## Learning Outcomes

- Distinguish clearly between **story chronology** and **narrative order**
- Identify how **flashback**, **in medias res**, **retrospective narration**, and **frame narrative** alter plot sequence
- Explain how reordered events shape **suspense**, **characterization**, **theme**, and **reader judgment**
- Analyze how **pacing** works with plot order to emphasize some moments and compress others
- Avoid plot summary by linking structural choices to meaning in AP prose analysis
- Build stronger thesis statements about structure for multiple-choice and free-response questions

## AP English Literature and Composition Syllabus

For the AP English Literature and Composition, you are expected to understand plot order of events in short fiction, with a focus on the following syllabus points:

- Know that **chronology** is the order events happen in the story world, while **narrative order** is the order the reader receives them
- Identify common structural devices, including **flashback**, **foreshadowing**, **in medias res**, **frame narrative**, and **retrospective narration**
- Explain the difference between a story told in **chronological order** and a **nonlinear narrative**
- Understand how delayed or rearranged information can shape **suspense**, **surprise**, and **interpretation**
- Analyze how plot order can reflect **memory**, **bias**, **trauma**, **nostalgia**, or limited knowledge
- Recognize how **pacing** slows, compresses, or expands time for emphasis
- Apply structure analysis to short-fiction examples such as **“A Rose for Emily,” “Araby,”** and **“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”**

## Test Your Knowledge

_Attempt these questions before reading this article. If you find some difficult or cannot remember the answers, look more closely at that area during your revision._

1. What is the difference between chronology and narrative order?
2. How is a flashback different from foreshadowing?
3. Why might an author begin a story in medias res rather than at the beginning?
4. How can nonlinear order change the reader’s judgment of a character?
5. What is retrospective narration, and how can it affect reliability?

## Introduction

In AP Literature, students often notice _what_ happens in a story before they notice _when_ the reader learns it. That second question matters just as much. Two stories can contain the same events but mean different things because the author arranges those events differently. Plot order is not just packaging. It is a major way fiction creates tension, controls sympathy, and guides interpretation.

This is especially useful for prose analysis. A strong essay does not just say that a story uses flashback or starts in the middle. It explains why the author chose that order and what effect it has on the reader. Structure becomes analysis only when it connects to meaning.

> **Key Term: chronology**
> The order in which events actually occur in the story world.

### Chronology versus narrative order

Students often use **plot** and **story** as if they mean the same thing. For AP analysis, that can blur an important distinction. The safest question to ask is this: what happened first in the fictional world, and what does the reader learn first?

> **Key Term: narrative order**
> The sequence in which the text presents events to the reader.

A story may be simple in chronology but complex in presentation. Suppose a character is abandoned in childhood, grows isolated, commits a shocking act, and dies years later. The chronology is straightforward. But the author may begin with the funeral, then move backward through memories and town gossip, making the reader assemble the life piece by piece. The events have not changed. The meaning has.

This distinction matters because narrative order controls judgment. If readers see a violent act before they know its cause, they may judge a character harshly. If the cause is revealed first, the same act may appear tragic, desperate, or shaped by long pressure. The order of knowledge shapes the order of emotion.

William Faulkner’s **“A Rose for Emily”** is a useful short-fiction example. Its chronology runs roughly from Emily’s life under her father, to his death, to her relationship with Homer Barron, to her later isolation, to the final discovery after her death. But the story does not present events in that order. It opens with her funeral and moves through a broken sequence of community memories. That structure turns the story into an investigation. Readers do not just watch events happen; they reconstruct them.

The result is more than suspense. The town’s fragmented telling also suggests that Emily’s life is known only through rumor, partial memory, and social observation. So the structure supports a theme about isolation and a point about how communities create narratives about people they do not truly understand.

> **Key Term: plot**
> The arrangement and interrelationship of events in a narrative, including how the author connects and presents them.
>
> **Test Tip:** In a prose passage question, do not stop at “the story is nonlinear.” Add the effect: “The nonlinear order withholds key facts, forcing the reader to reconstruct the past and revise judgments about the protagonist.”

### Major ways authors rearrange time

The most common structural device students spot is the **flashback**, but naming it is only the first step.

> **Key Term: flashback**
> A shift from the present narrative to an earlier event in order to reveal background or deepen the current action.

A flashback interrupts present action. That interruption is usually purposeful. It may explain motive, add emotional depth, or show how the past still governs the present. If a character freezes at an ordinary sound, and the narrative then moves back to an earlier traumatic scene, the flashback does more than fill in background. It changes how the present moment should be read.

A good short-fiction example is **“The Scarlet Ibis.”** The remembered past makes the ending more painful because the narrator’s hindsight frames the events with guilt. The story does not just tell what happened; it tells what later memory does to what happened.

Students also confuse flashback with **foreshadowing**.

> **Key Term: foreshadowing**
> Hints or clues that suggest later developments in the story.

Foreshadowing does not fully move the story into the future. It signals, suggests, or prepares. A gloomy setting, repeated warnings, or a strange object may point ahead. The timeline stays in the present moment of narration. Flashback, by contrast, relocates the reader to an earlier time.

Another major opening strategy is **in medias res**.

> **Key Term: in medias res**
> A narrative opening that begins in the middle of the action, with earlier events supplied later.

Beginning in medias res creates immediate tension because the reader enters a situation already underway. There are questions at once: Who are these people? Why is this conflict happening? What came before? That uncertainty can make a story gripping from the first line. But again, the point is not speed alone. It also controls sympathy. If we meet a character under pressure before we know their history, we may respond first to urgency, then later revise our views as exposition arrives.

Some stories use a **frame narrative**.

> **Key Term: frame narrative**
> A structure in which one story is enclosed within another narrative situation or storyteller’s account.

In a frame narrative, the outer story affects how we read the inner one. If a tale comes to us through a storyteller, a manuscript, or a listener’s recollection, the frame can add distance, doubt, or cultural perspective. Washington Irving’s **“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”** gains some of its tone from being presented as a tale handed down rather than as direct fact. That matters because the frame encourages uncertainty about how literally events should be taken.

A related but separate idea is **retrospective narration**.

> **Key Term: retrospective narration**
> A narrative told after the events have happened, often with added reflection, hindsight, or judgment.

James Joyce’s **“Araby”** is a good example. The boy’s experience is narrated through an older consciousness looking back. That structure matters because the story is not only about youthful desire; it is also about later understanding of that desire. The retrospective voice can produce irony. The younger self may feel grand passion or heroic purpose, while the older voice sees blindness, vanity, or painful innocence.

This is why retrospective narration can affect reliability in a complicated way. A retrospective narrator may understand more than the younger self did, but memory is selective. Looking back can clarify; it can also reshape.

> **Test Tip:** If the narrator is looking back, ask two questions: what does hindsight help the narrator understand, and what might hindsight distort?

### How plot order shapes meaning and reader response

Authors rearrange events because order changes effect. Four common effects appear often in AP questions: suspense, surprise, characterization, and theme.

First, **suspense**. If readers know less than characters, tension often comes from uncertainty. Delayed revelation keeps us asking what happened, what is hidden, or what will be uncovered. In **“A Rose for Emily,”** the final discovery matters because the story withholds the full truth until the end. Earlier details, such as the smell and Homer’s disappearance, are reinterpreted only afterward.

Second, **surprise**. A story may guide the reader toward one assumption, then reveal information that forces a new reading. Surprise is strongest when the earlier details still fit, but in a new way. This is different from random shock. Good structure makes the later revelation feel earned.

Third, **characterization**. Plot order can make a character seem mysterious, sympathetic, foolish, damaged, or self-deceived. If a painful memory appears only after harsh present-day behavior, the reader may shift from judgment to pity. If an apparently noble narrator reveals earlier selfish motives late in the story, the reader may shift the other way.

Fourth, **theme**. Reordered time can reflect a story’s deepest ideas. A broken sequence may suggest that the past is not past, that memory controls identity, or that truth comes only in fragments. A circular structure may imply that a character cannot escape an old pattern. A steady chronological movement may support clear cause and effect, especially in stories about moral consequence.

> **Key Term: nonlinear narrative**
> A narrative whose presentation of events does not follow straightforward chronological sequence.

Students sometimes assume nonlinear structure is automatically deeper or more modern. That is a mistake. A chronological structure can be just as meaningful. A story told in order may stress inevitability, accumulation, or moral sequence. The key question is always why this order fits this story.

### Pacing, sequence, and writing stronger AP analysis

Order of events is closely tied to **pacing**.

> **Key Term: pacing**
> The speed at which a narrative presents events, including where it slows down, skips ahead, or lingers.

Pacing is about time spent on events, not just order. An author may cover years in one sentence, then spend a whole paragraph on a glance, gesture, or realization. That contrast signals importance. Students who track order but ignore pacing miss half the structural work.

For example, a story may summarize an entire childhood quickly but slow sharply at one humiliating scene. That tells you the scene is not just another event; it is formative. Or a narrative may move rapidly through ordinary days and then stall at a moment of dread, making the reader feel the pressure of waiting.

When writing an AP prose analysis, avoid a list of labels. Do not write: “The author uses flashback, foreshadowing, and pacing.” That is feature-spotting. Instead, build a line of reasoning:

- identify the structural choice
- state what information it withholds or reveals
- explain how that affects the reader
- connect that effect to character or theme

Here is the difference.

Weak analysis:
The story uses flashbacks and foreshadowing.

Stronger analysis:
The story interrupts present action with flashbacks that reveal the narrator’s earlier failures only after his confident self-presentation, so the delayed information weakens his authority and turns the narrative into a study of self-deception.

That second version explains function.

A helpful planning method for short fiction is to make two quick lists:

1. **story chronology**: what happened first, second, third
2. **narrative order**: what the reader learns first, second, third

The gap between those two lists often gives you your thesis.

You should also watch for multiple techniques working together. A story might begin in medias res, use retrospective narration, and include flashbacks. If so, do not treat them as separate ornaments. Ask how they combine. Do they mirror memory? Build uncertainty? Show bias? Create a frame through which experience is filtered?

For multiple-choice questions, plot order often appears indirectly. You may be asked what likely happened before the excerpt, what function a shift serves, or how a passage changes the reader’s understanding. Those are structure questions even if the word “structure” is absent.

For free response, structure can become an excellent organizing principle. You can move through a passage in order, explaining how each shift in time changes interpretation. That helps you stay analytical instead of summarizing.

## Key Point Checklist

_This article has covered the following key knowledge points:_

- **Chronology** is the order events happen in the story world
- **Narrative order** is the order the reader receives those events
- A story can have simple chronology but complex plot structure
- **Flashback** shifts backward to earlier events; **foreshadowing** hints ahead without fully shifting time
- **In medias res** begins in the middle of action and creates immediate questions
- **Frame narrative** places one story inside another telling situation
- **Retrospective narration** uses hindsight, which can add insight or bias
- **Nonlinear narrative** often delays revelation, changes judgment, and makes readers reconstruct events
- **Pacing** controls emphasis by compressing some time periods and slowing key moments
- Strong AP analysis explains why an author reveals an event where it appears, not just what the device is
- **“A Rose for Emily”** is a useful example of nonlinear structure and delayed revelation
- **“Araby”** shows how retrospective narration can shape interpretation through hindsight

## Key Terms and Concepts

- chronology
- narrative order
- plot
- flashback
- foreshadowing
- in medias res
- frame narrative
- retrospective narration
- nonlinear narrative
- pacing


Short Fiction I - Plot order of events