“And that is why novels, even when they are about wicked people, can solace us: they suggest a more comprehensible and thus more manageable human race, they give us the illusion of perspicacity and of power.”
In Aspects of the Novel Forster focuses on the literary form and the elements that make up fiction and in writing prose. In the chapter The People, he handles the subject of characters in fiction, specifically the flat and rounded characters. He acknowledges the use of flat characters in great fiction but also highlights the significance of rounded characters. In that, the reader has a grasp on their own reality through revealing of characters in the novel even the hidden parts. In the assertion, Forster emphasizes the comfort that fiction offers by focusing on rounding the characters and showing their true motives. Since it brings a sort of catharsis to the readers that the human experience can be placed into perspective.
“A plot cannot be told to a gaping audience of cave-men or to a tyrannical sultan or to their modern descendant the movie-public. They can only be kept awake by “and then—and then—” They can only supply curiosity. But a plot demands intelligence and memory also.”
Forster emphasizes the difference between story and plot and the significance of both in fiction writing. He affirms that plays and movies are spectacles with storylines that aim to trigger curiosity from the audience through what will happen next. However, with the plot, it is more of telling rather than showing. In that plot is about answering ‘Why’ and not ‘What next’. Thus expresses a novel, unlike drama or films, demands the art of telling which will require memory and aptitude from the reader. As the author may delay clarifications and causality in order to build the plot sufficiently.
“Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.”
In the chapter on Pattern and Rhythm, Forster draws a comparison between music composition and writing fiction. He stresses that the plot and characters can feel unnatural or constrained by a pattern that has been forced. Thus, to achieve the desired sincerity a certain rhythm has to be adopted to avoid unbalanced prose. Like a symphony, a novel has to attain certain freedom when the elements are liberated as the plot progresses.
