This definitions covers Key Terms for Plot and Structure Analysis within Plot & Narrative Structure for GCSE English Literature. Revise Plot & Narrative Structure in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for GCSE English Literature with 10 exam-style questions and 15 flashcards. This is a high-frequency topic, so it is worth revising until the explanation feels precise and repeatable. It is section 9 of 15 in this topic. Make sure you can use the exact wording confidently, because definition marks are often lost through vague language.
📖 Key Terms for Plot and Structure Analysis
- Retrospective narrator
- A first-person narrator who tells a story from the past, commenting on events they have already experienced. Adult Pip knows how the story ends — his irony about young Pip's mistakes is a structural device Dickens uses to create dramatic irony and moral clarity simultaneously.
- Dramatic irony
- Where the reader (or narrator) knows something a character does not. Pip's assumption that Miss Havisham is his benefactor is the novel's central dramatic irony — the reader gradually suspects, then knows, what Pip does not.
- Three-stage structure
- Dickens labelled the novel's sections "Stages" — Stage 1 (marshes, childhood), Stage 2 (London, false gentleman), Stage 3 (reckoning). This is not merely chapter grouping: each stage has its own moral argument.
- Ambiguous ending
- Dickens wrote two endings. The revised (published) ending softens the original — Pip and Estella meet in the ruins of Satis House. The final line refuses to confirm reconciliation. Dickens deliberately resists the "reward" plot the novel seems to promise.
Practice questions for Plot & Narrative Structure
Pip explicitly labels the three parts of his life story using which unusual structural term?
Explain how Dickens uses first-person retrospective narration to create dramatic irony in Great Expectations.
Quick recall flashcards
Mnemonic: How do you remember the three structural stages of Great Expectations?
M — M — M
MARSHES → METROPOLIS → MERCY
MARSHES: origins, innocence, false expectations kindled (Chs. 1–18)
METROPOLIS: London, corruption, the Magwitch revelation destroys everything (Chs. 19–39)
MERCY: reckoning, humility, care for Magwitch, ambiguous ending (Chs. 40–59)
Dickens moves Pip from flat moral landscape → dazzling false world → painful self-knowledge. The three M's track his arc.
What is dramatic irony, and give an example from Great Expectations's structure?
Dramatic irony: when the audience/reader knows something that a character does not — the gap between character knowledge and reader knowledge creates tension, comedy, or tragedy.
In Great Expectations: the adult narrator knows Magwitch is the benefactor from the start of the narration; the reader learns this in Chapter 39. But crucially, Dickens constructs the READER's false assumption just as he constructs Pip's — we too believe in Miss Havisham's patronage. The revelation therefore corrects both character and reader simultaneously.