While narratives need only contain one plotline, quite a few of them contain many more. The number of plotlines can in and of itself express a particular worldview, although quite what that worldview is does not have to be the same in every case. For instance, a narrative with only one plotline could express a certain obsession or narrowness of focus on the part of the narrator; alternatively – and especially if it is allowed to unfold with a great degree of breadth and depth – it could express a belief that everything that matters is a part of the same grand narrative. It is not necessarily the case, meanwhile, that a narrative with multiple plotlines recognises greater complexity in its world than a narrative with only one plotline; what is does tend to recognise is our tendency to experience the world as a set of separate threads (characters, activities, beliefs and so on) which we may either wish to tie up with one another or keep carefully apart.
There is, then, no universal rule to which we can appeal to connect the kind of plot structure a narrative employs to the story it tells. All we can do (which is still actually quite a bit) is separate out the separate plotlines a given narrative might contain, establish how they relate to one another (do they run in parallel lines, for instance? do they intersect? is one somehow subordinate to another, its principal goal being to help us understand what we regard to be the main plot?), and reflect on how this structure upholds, undermines or in any way relates to the themes of the play or the worldviews expressed through other elements of the work’s narrative techniques.
Return to Plot structure