Two Plots, Side by Side

Conflict is the root of any good plot. This week’s writing assignments highlight this fact perfectly, albeit in slightly different ways.

Margaret Atwood’s Happy Endings shows not only how a story without any conflict would be quite boring, but also how almost every ending is essentially the same. The journey the characters take on their way to the ending is what really makes a story. Each alternative narrative that Atwood presents becomes increasingly tragic and, in many cases, depressing, yet she insists that every version of the story ends the same way: A happy ending.  The couple in the story falls in love and lives happily ever after, no matter what else might take place. Until they both die, of course. Because it is this fact: That all stories must end as all lives do, which highlights the main point that a story is comprised of the events that lead us to an end, and not the end itself.

Eudora Welty’s A Worn Path is an exercise in taking a very simple story and making it fantastical by making small events seem larger than life. If this story had been written in the more plain language of Happy Endings, it might read something like this: An old black woman travels from her home through the woods to a town to get medicine for her grandson. Along the way, she finds money and is able to also buy him a toy. The end.

This version still tells the basic tale, but it is in no way the same story. Welty’s version is so much more whimsical. From the moment the reader meets Phoenix Jackson, it is implied that there is something more to her than meets the eye. The name Phoenix itself suggests that some kind of magic may be at play. So much so that when she begins to talk to animals she sees in the woods, the reader is almost expectant for them to start talking back. Welty uses this almost supernatural feeling to manufacture conflicts where there really are none. The apparent normalcy of her trip, once it is finally revealed, actually feels like a plot twist.

The main point to be derived from these stories is that no matter how interesting or happy an ending may be, it does not dictate the quality of a story (just ask anyone who watched all six seasons of Lost). No; a story is made by its plot and a story’s plot is built on conflict.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. Happy Endings. Backpack Literature. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. Pearson, 2012. 290-293. Print.

Welty, Eudora. A Worn Path. Backpack Literature. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. Pearson, 2012. 365-372. Print.