Megan Staffel: Breaking Out – Narrative Shifts (January 2012)

Megan Staffel examines how the “break-out scene,” which changes the tonal register and trajectory of a piece of fiction, deepens characterization and narrative drive. Looking at “The Dead,” she show how Joyce uses scenes of stillness to suspend characters in a kind of tension which pressures them to change both understanding and behavior, and allows him to boldly change the direction of his story. In addition, Staffel observes how Shirley Hazzard uses break-out scenes in The Transit of Venus to increase narrative distance and prepare for profound and sudden changes in the understandings she had previously urged upon her reader.