Towards the end of most classic plots there is a sudden reversal of fortune. A turning point. A twist. Something that confounds the reader’s (or viewer’s) expectations. Aristotle (in his classic work ‘The Poetics’) called it peripeteia.
It’s a staple of crime dramas. All the evidence points to the guilt of the hero, or the hero’s best mate, and then in an astonishing final chapter the single bit of evidence that didn’t quite fit is incorporated into a new narrative which proves beyond doubt that someone else is guilty. That’s peripeteia.
But Aristotle was quite strict. The reversal works best if the reader (or viewer) ends up saying: ‘of course that’s how it had to be’. In other words, the new narrative must be seen as being necessary even though it was utterly unexpected. It has to be seen as inevitable, given what is known (now) about the circumstances.
The classic example, used by Aristotle, is Oedipus Rex, the play by Sophocles. Towards the end of the play Oedipus, King of Thebes, discovers that he has murdered his biological father and married his biological mother, unwittingly committing both parricide and incest. The shock of this discovery causes him to blind himself (and his wife-mother to hang herself) thus evoking what Aristotle said all good tragedies should evoke: pity and fear.
It’s a staple of crime dramas. All the evidence points to the guilt of the hero, or the hero’s best mate, and then in an astonishing final chapter the single bit of evidence that didn’t quite fit is incorporated into a new narrative which proves beyond doubt that someone else is guilty. That’s peripeteia.
But Aristotle was quite strict. The reversal works best if the reader (or viewer) ends up saying: ‘of course that’s how it had to be’. In other words, the new narrative must be seen as being necessary even though it was utterly unexpected. It has to be seen as inevitable, given what is known (now) about the circumstances.
The classic example, used by Aristotle, is Oedipus Rex, the play by Sophocles. Towards the end of the play Oedipus, King of Thebes, discovers that he has murdered his biological father and married his biological mother, unwittingly committing both parricide and incest. The shock of this discovery causes him to blind himself (and his wife-mother to hang herself) thus evoking what Aristotle said all good tragedies should evoke: pity and fear.
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