Find the term you want to know about and click on it for a short definition, some examples (mostly from children's classics, since many people are familiar with them -- and if you are not, you could quickly locate and read the book to understand the term better), brief explanation of the way this term can be used in the interpretation of literature, and sometimes links to other people's pages.
Plot: Exposition, Rising Action, Crisis or Climax, Falling Action, Resolution, Subplot
Character: Main Character, Hero, Protagonist, Antagonist, Parallel Character, Character Foil, Minor Character, Narrator
Example: In Peter Rabbit, Mr. MacGregor is the antagonist, because it is his garden that Peter sneaks into.
Interpretive Use: The antagonist may not be obvious, in which case you could choose a candidate and discuss why he or she deserves to be thought of as the antagonist. An antagonist may not even be a person-or may be the same person as the main character.
Example: In Cinderella, the climactic moment of the plot occurs when Cinderella fits her foot into the glass slipper, thereby "winning" marriage with the Prince.
Interpretive Use: In many stories, there are several points in the plot which are plausible crises. This is especially true when there are several almost-equal major characters. Try finding the moment which you think is the most important and discussing why it deserves to be thought of as the crisis of the plot. OR you could also try explaining why this particular story seems to have no crisis (if that is how you see it).
Example: Every fairy tale begins with expository information: "There once was a king and queen who wanted a child...." or "Once upon a time there lived a merchant with one daughter and two stepdaughters...." and so forth. The characters are described and sometimes named; their family relationships are specified.
Interpretive Use: Think about how much information the story gives at the beginning. Sometimes there is a lot, and the exposition stretches out; sometimes the story starts in the middle (or, if you want to use an impressive Latin term, in medias res) and the expository information is tucked in unobtrusively as people talk to each other or inside the narrator's descriptions. What does this author do with the exposition and why did he or she make that choice?
Example: In most fairy tales, there is not much falling action: "So they were married and lived happily ever after" combines the falling action of the marriage and the resolution of everlasting happiness into one sentence. But in some versions of Snow White, the wicked queen comes to Snow White's marriage and is punished: the prince has ordered someone to make iron shoes, and they have been heated in an oven; the queen is forced to wear them to dance at the wedding feast, and so she dies. These events are falling action.
Interpretive Use: Depending on where you place the story's crisis, there may not appear to be much falling action. What events are required to finish the conflict once and for all? Try to name the events of the falling action, OR explain why the crisis and resolution do not require much (or any) falling action.
Example: In Peter Rabbit, the rabbit sisters Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail stay at home and are good (but boring) while Peter goes out and raids Mr. MacGregor's garden, which is naughty (but interesting). While confirming the story's "moral" on the surface, the rabbit sisters also reinforce the idea that acting independently is much more interesting than being docile.
Interpretive Use: Finding character foils and explaining the contrasts between them is a standard type of assignment, though the term may not be used. "Compare and contrast X and Y" (with characters' names instead of "X" and "Y") usually means either "discuss why X and Y are character foils" or "discuss why X and Y are parallel characters."
Example: Peter Rabbit is the hero of Peter Rabbit if you consider his garden raid to be particularly exciting; he is the protagonist when you are discussing his conflict with Mr. MacGregor, who owns the garden; he is always the main character, because he is the character who is most often present and whose actions are most important to the story. (Tile characters are not always main characters, though of course they may be.)
Interpretive Use: There may be more than one character who is important enough to be called "main"; there may not be any character who seems to qualify. In those cases, figuring out whether there is a main character and who it is may be an interesting and even difficult interpretive job.
Example: In Cinderella, the Prince's father and mother are minor characters.
Interpretive Use: There is rarely much interesting to say about really minor characters, though several similar minor characters may have an important effect as a group.
First-person Narrator: stands out as a character and refers to himself or herself, using "I." Example: Jane Eyre narrates Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre, which allows Bronte to let her readers know just how the limitations of Jane's life galled her, and how Jane secretly fell in love with her employer, Mr. Rochester.
Second-person Narrator: addresses the reader and/or the Main Character as "you" (and may also use first-person narration, but not necessarily). Example: This technique is rarely used, except briefly; Beatrix Potter addresses the readers near the end of Peter Rabbit in order to underline the "proper" moral which the bulk of the story undermines. Another brief example is the opening of each of Rudyard Kipling's Just-So Stories, in which the narrator refers to the child-listener as "O Best-Beloved."
Third-person Narrator: not a character in the story; refers to the story's characters as "he" and "she." This is probably the most common form of narration, so I won't give a specific example.
Limited Narrator: can only tell what one person is thinking or feeling. Example: in Peter Rabbit, we don't find out what Mr. McGregor thinks about, or what Mother rabbit thinks about, or what Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail thought about--only Peter.
Omniscient Narrator: not a character in the story; can tell what any or all characters are thinking and feeling. Example: In Cinderella, several important plot events, such as the finding of the glass slipper, take place when Cinderella herself is not present; in these scenes, the audience sometimes knows what other characters, like the Prince or the stepmother, are thinking.
Reliable Narrator: everything this narrator says is true, and the narrator knows everything that is necessary to the story.
Unreliable Narrator: may not know all the relevant information; may be intoxicated or mentally ill; may lie to the audience. Example: Edgar Allan Poe's narrators are frequently unreliable. Think of the delusions that the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" has about the old man.
Interpretive Use: The type of narrator telling the story can be vitally important to you as the reader or interpreter, especially if the narrator is unreliable. Not every unreliable narrator is as easy to spot as Poe's in "The Tell-Tale Heart"; there may be a lot of scholarly debate about whether a given narrator is reliable or not, and obviously you need to know how much of the narration you can trust. If you cannot trust the narrator to tell you what happened, then just summarizing the events of the story can be very challenging. A first-person narrator may easily be a little unreliable, since everyone wants to tell their own story in a way which shows himself or herself in a good light. If the narration is limited, why has the author chosen to show readers only this person's thoughts? If the narrator addresses the reader directly, does that draw you in or alienate you? All these issues and more arise when discussing the narrator's role.
Example: In the children's novel The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, the main character Mary Lennox is a spoiled, neglected child who eventually learns to care for a garden and to feel sympathy for others. Partly, she is able to change because of her interactions with her cousin Colin Craven, who is even more spoiled and even more neglected. Colin's role in the story is to show Mary and the reader how badly she needs to change, before she becomes as friendless and helpless as Colin.
Interpretive Use: Parallel characters often have Subplots of their own, which reflect the main Plot and its Themes. Understand the parallel characters, and the main character and the overall theme(s) of the story will be easier to understand.
Example: In a mystery novel, there is usually a scene near the end in which the detective explains which clues were really important and how the detective figured out who the criminal was. This is a resolution scene because it enables the reader to make retroactive sense of the whole novel, but the scene is not an actual event in the plot.
Interpretive Use: Is there a resolution section in the story you are examining? If so, what needs to be explained or re-evaluated? If not, why doesn't the story need resolution -- or why has the author chosen to leave certain matters in the story unresolved? Answering questions like this can often be useful and interesting.
Example: In most versions of Cinderella, Cinderella finds out about the ball, is forbidden to go by her stepmother, gets magical help, acquires at least one beautiful dress, goes to the ball, dances with the prince, and runs away before the ball is over. These events are all part of the rising action. Another example of rising action is in a mystery novel: the events that take place in between the initial crime and the capture of the criminal (in most cases) are the rising action, which is also the section in which the clues are placed.
Interpretive Use: Not all the events of a long or complicated story are part of the rising action. Some events belong to Subplots; or in the case of the mystery novel, may exist only to distract you from the really important rising action. Identifying the events that are really part of the rising action can in some cases be a rewarding interpretive activity.