Author: Nicole Malley

In my seed shape essay, Can Real Life be Plotted on A Seed Shape Diagram? I discuss how stories are often mapped out using a plot diagram. A plot diagram is a seed shape in which your exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution can be plotted onto a horizontal line that rises into a triangle then falls back into a horizontal line. This seed shape is a type of fractal, which is a geometric term that refers to a shape that is “characterized by the repetition of similar patterns at ever-diminishing scales.” (Eglash 4). In other words, a fractal is a shape that repeats itself infinitely. In my seed shape essay, I wrote about how this fractal, or plot diagram, is often used by authors to create their stories. Authors can use the plot diagram to brainstorm their story’s beginning, middle, and end. Up until now, I have only read stories that followed this repetitive structure: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. Back in February, I wrote my feelings about the plot diagram. “I felt comforted by the seed shape. I knew what to expect, and roughly when to expect it.” (Malley). It was not until I read The Water Cure by Percival Everett for my ENGL 337 course, African American Literature, that I experienced what it is like to read a novel that does not follow this comforting and predictable pattern of events. 

Percival Everett does not appear to have used a plot diagram when mapping out his story The Water Cure. The Water Cure is a novel about a man named Ishmael Kidder whose eleven year old daughter Lane was abducted, raped, and murdered. Kidder, as a form of revenge or perhaps as a way to cope, then kidnaps and tortures a man (who may or may not be his daughter’s assailant) in his basement. The story is written from Kidder’s point of view, and does not follow your typical story outline. Kidder tells his story through what can only be described as ramblings and tangents, which are separated on the page by three asterisks, and jump back and forth chronologically. 

The story begins with the yiddish proverb, as cited by Percival Everett, “The truth rests with God and a little bit with me.” (Everett 9) This is a bold start to the novel, and already hints to readers that we will not be given the full truth in this story. Everett’s narrator Ishmael Kidder will be keeping secrets from us. His last name alone, Kidder, is enough for us to assume he is an unreliable narrator, since Oxford Languages defines the word “kidder” as “a person who deceives others in a playful way.” This uncertainty is unsettling to me. How will I be able to determine the truth? Will I be fooled?

Kidder attempts to fool us readers throughout his narration. One example is that Kidder very directly states that he will not eat restaurant food. “I’ll eat in restaurants, but I won’t eat their food. I prefer to take my own.” (Everett 50). However, nearly two hundred pages later, Kidder casually recalls a time where he was in a diner. In his retelling, he recalls ordering and then eating the diner’s chili. “Thank you. I’ll have the chili.” (Everett 243) and “I ate my chili with beans.” (Everett 244). This scene contradicts Kidder’s previous statement that he will not eat restaurant food. This caused me to go back and find proof that Kidder stated previously that he does not eat in restaurants, because he had me second guessing myself. He tricked me. His lie shows that he is: 1.) unreliable and 2.) trying to fool us readers and make us second guess ourselves. 

Kidder’s unreliable narration is not only full of lies, but is also very confusing. Kidder will start thoughts and not finish them until much later, when the thought has already slipped his reader’s mind. For example, on page 26 of the pdf of The Water Cure, Kidder presents us with a puzzle. “A man is standing on the bank of a wide river. With him are a monster, a child, and a bag of chocolates. He must get all three to the other side, but his boat is so small that he can take only one across at a time. He could not ever leave the monster with the child for it would eat her, and he could not leave the child with the chocolates for she would eat them. The monster hates chocolates and would never touch them. How does the man get all three across?” (Everett 26). This puzzle is then not mentioned again until nearly 200 pages later, when Kidder says “Answer to puzzle: Kill the monster.” (Everett 223). The answer was unprompted and had no reason to be revealed 197 pages after the puzzle was first introduced, yet here we are. Everett is not afraid to catch his readers off guard and to be unpredictable in his writing. His unpredictability could not be planned out on a plot diagram. His unpredictability is uncomfortable. I can not see his next move before it happens.

Kidder does not speak in a foreseeable manner. Sometimes Everett, as Kidder, chooses to spell words incorrectly. “Me wlife pryor to leavening Charm’s Lot is lift zen snoopshits of vetter thymes, her miles when I whood me eat here at the dour, her shrilly runing thorough the whouse, hurt farce seam-eared with dirth from the god’s den…”. (Everett 223). This same sentence is written (and spelled correctly) on the previous page: “My life before leaving Charlotte is left to me in wrinkled snapshots of good times: her smile when I would meet her at the door, her silly running through the house with her arms unmoving by her sides, her face smeared with dirt from the garden…” (Everett 222). What is the point of repeating the same sentence, but with the words misspelled? What is the point of this iteration?  Of the incoherence? Is there even a point to this at all? Is he just trying to trick me? 

In Ron Eglash’s book, African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design Eglash defines iteration. “In iteration, there is only one transformation process, but each time the process creates an output, it uses this result as the input for the next iteration, as we’ve seen in generating fractals.” (Eglash 110). Reading The Water Cure created a transformative process within myself. As I mentioned above, I used to only read books that followed the predictable pattern of the plot diagram. Examples of which are romance books. In romance books, I can almost always see what comes next before it happens, unlike The Water Cure. I can almost always figure out who the main love interest will be just from the first few chapters. I also know that the main protagonist will get together with their love interest in the story. After getting together, there will be some sort of conflict. Maybe they will have a fight, or maybe the world will try to keep them apart. Then the story goes one of two ways: either they overcome their conflict and stay together, or they split up. When reading those types of books, I know what to expect for the most part, and roughly when to expect it. Percival Everett’s The Water Cure is so unpredictable that it often made me uncomfortable with the unknown. As mentioned above, Kidder speaks in tangents, and they come on randomly. They jump from past to present, and sometimes they do not make sense. Other times they are clear as day and even include detailed dialogue and description, like his scenes with his agent Sally. “‘Hello, Ishmael!’ She is cheery, always cheery, but never quite happy, and she will be even less happy with me shortly.” (Everett 49). Other times, the words are spelled incorrectly, like in my example above, or he is using math equations to represent the kidnapping of a possibly innocent man. “Man X is identical with Man Y. Man X = Man Y.” (Everett 51). While reading this text and trying to decipher the deeper meaning behind Kidder’s ramblings, I felt like I was being tricked, purposefully confused, and lied to. How can Man X = Man Y? Man X and Man Y are two separate individuals. Because of this, reading the novel was at times an unnerving experience for me. 

Though reading this story was often uncomfortable, I was able to open up my mind and allow myself to read a book unlike anything I have ever read before. I have started to push and challenge myself to be uncomfortable, and to be okay with that feeling. Maybe it is okay to not know what to expect. Maybe it is okay if things are not repetitive or predictable like fractals. I am even starting to learn that maybe it is okay to read something that makes me uncomfortable, because in doing so I am allowing myself to experience something new, and different. 

Taking this course has exposed me to new and different things, and has brought on this new iteration of myself. As I get ready to graduate this month, I will continue to take with me the lessons I have learned in this class: It is okay to be confused at first and uncomfortable with the idea of trying something new, but you must not let these things stop you. Unlike Kidder’s belief that Man X=Man Y, I know that Man X and Man Y are not the same. I know that I am unique, and not the same as anyone else. Even though I took this course with twenty four other SUNY Geneseo students, I know that my takeaways and journey with this course is special. Man X does not equal Man Y. Like in iterations, I will take these lessons and input them, so that I can output a new and improved version of myself. My new iteration will be a version of me who is not afraid to try something different, and who will work to feel comfortable with the uncomfortable.

When I was in elementary school, my sixth grade teacher introduced me to my first ever seed shape in the form of a plot diagram. It’s a simple looking shape: two horizontal lines with a triangle in between them, representing the five stages of a plot. Starting on the left straight line is your exposition. How will your story begin? Where will it take place? Who are your characters? Then, as you start to climb up the triangle, you find yourself embarking on your rising action. Things are getting exciting. You’re building up to something big. Then, before you know it, you find yourself on the very tip of the triangle. The peak. Your climax. This is when things are at their most intense. From here, the only way you can go is down, so you find yourself in your falling action. This is when your story starts to wrap up any loose ends, before leveling back out on a horizontal line, and arriving at your resolution, or end. This seed shape was always very helpful for me. I used it to write my own stories, and to place other author’s stories into points on the diagram. I felt comforted by the seed shape. I knew what to expect, and roughly when to expect it. But what happens when authors tell a true story? Can a person’s real life mold into a predictable shape? When dissecting two slave narratives, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave” written by Fredrick Douglass and “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs, I tried to do just that. 

Frederick Douglass’s narrative begins in the way most slave narratives do; “I was born…”. This beginning, or exposition, sets the scene on a young Fredrick Douglass, living in Maryland. Douglass was born enslaved. At this point, I would like to introduce another seed shape. Imagine a dome is drawn over the triangle seed shape. On the left side, at the first point of our dome we have “order”. Then arching over our triangle to the right side is our final point: “order restored”. In the middle is “disorder”. Young Fredrick being enslaved is considered “order” during this time period in the south. Now, as Douglass moves away from his exposition of childhood, and up the triangle in his rising action, we are approaching “disorder”. Douglass’s rising action is when he moves to Baltimore and embarks on a journey to learn to read and write. This was discouraged, since white people were scared that once enslaved people learned how to read and write, they would become “unmanageable”, “unhappy” and begin to fight against slavery. Mr. Auld, Douglass’s enslaver at the time, said in response to Douglass learning to read, “It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.” (Douglass 287). This takes us to our climax of the narrative. Learning to read and write empowered Douglass, just as Mr. Auld feared. He wanted to fight, and he did. He fought his next enslaver, Mr. Covey. “I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to that resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose.” (Douglass 302). The decision to fight Mr. Covey is an intense part in Douglass’s narrative, and fits into the “disorder” portion of the diagram because of Douglass’s act of rebellion. Douglass wrote, “This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning point in my career as a slave.” (Douglass 302). We have now reached the turning point on our triangle, which takes us to the falling action. The falling action in this narrative is when Fredrick Douglass puts a plan to run away into action. Douglass’s plan to escape first fails, landing him in jail, thus resulting in more “disorder”. It is not until his second attempt, that he successfully makes it North to New Bedford, which is our resolution and “order restored”. Douglass’s arrival to the North is considered to be “order restored” because the entire narrative leads up to this moment of freedom.

Harriet Jacobs’ slave narrative can also be plotted on the triangle seed shape. We start the same as Douglass with, “I was born…”, where Jacobs shares that she was born enslaved, and hadn’t realized for her first six years of life, due to her childhood being a relatively happy one. This narrative (like Douglass’s) starts on the side of “order”, and begins with the exposition of a young Harriet (who calls herself “Linda” in the narrative), born into slavery. Our rising action, and beginning of “disorder”, is when Jacobs’ “kind mistress sickened and died.” (Jacobs 436). After Harriet’s “kind mistress” died, she became enslaved to Dr. Flint’s daughter. Dr. Flint was not a good man, and he took advantage of Harriet sexually. This takes us to our climax. In a chapter titled “The Jealous Mistress”, we see how Dr. Flint’s wife’s jealousy affects Harriet. “She felt that her marriage vows were desecrated, her dignity insulted; but she had no compassion for the poor victim of her husband’s perfidy. She pitied herself as a martyr; but she was incapable of feeling for the condition of shame and misery in which her unfortunate, helpless slave was placed.” (Jacobs 442). The watchful, jealous eye of Mrs. Flint, along with the sexual abuse of Dr. Flint eventually led to Harriet having children with a white man named Mr. Sands, due to a desperate desire to be free of the Flints. Shortly after having the babies, Harriet decides to run away. Our falling action is when Harriet runs away and stays hidden in the crawlspace of her grandmother’s house for seven years. Eventually, when the opportunity and help arose, Harriet takes a boat North, thus escaping enslavement and finding freedom, giving readers a resolution and “order restored”. 

This exercise of putting true narratives about real people into plots on a seed shape diagram got me thinking. Can real lives truly be placed so neatly onto this triangle seed shape? The answer is both yes and no. Yes, I can plot an “exposition” to my own life, but there are so many beginnings to choose from. I could start with my own birth, or perhaps my first day of high school or college. Where you start your story changes the trajectory of your points on the shape. Depending on where I start and end my story, my rising action, climax, and falling action are all different. If I start my story at birth and end at my own death, there is guaranteed to be more than one rising action, more than one climax, more than one falling action, some even going on at the same time. It becomes a repetitive, fractal-like pattern that continues to go up and down through the ebbs and flows of real life. Ron Eglash defines fractals as being “characterized by the repetition of similar patterns at ever-diminishing scales.” (Eglash 4). Imagine off of every straight line, another triangle appears carrying the same points: rising action, climax, falling action; repeating infinitely. Life, like fractals, are repetitive. One’s life could not completely be summed up if using just one triangle seed shape. We have multiple seed shapes going on in multiple directions, infinitely, since our lives are long, complex, and can not be summed up perfectly on one plot with only 5 plot points. We need fractals; we need infinity. By saying all of this, I mean to point out that the authors of these narratives picked where to start and end their story, which was their birth to their freedom. Had the narratives continued past freedom, the triangle seed shape would go on, with new rising actions, new climaxes, new falling actions, and a new resolution. Life was not perfect, and order was not fully restored when Fredrick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs made it to the North. There were still struggles, there were still obstacles to be overcome. Their lives, stories, and legacies do not stop when their narratives reach their resolution; their hardships are not limited to the ones they chose to share; they go on much further and much longer, with lots more “disorder” in the middle.