The Speed of Plot: Narrative Acceleration and Deceleration

Abstract

When characters travel 'at the speed of plot', they need to arrive at the conclusion of the story by the time the narrative comes to its end on the page. This article develops the popular notion of 'plot speed' into a conceptual contribution to the study of time in narrative. 'Plot speed' is the conceptual velocity of movement through plot events, and it can be rooted in the physical speed of the storyworld (where characters are in a rush) or the discourse speed (where the written form of the narrative indicates chapters, instalments, and so on). I investigate configurations of plot speed through Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, its precursor Courtilz de Sandras’s Mémoires de M. d’Artagnan, and the manuscripts in which Dumas collaborated with Auguste Maquet, thus arguing for narratological investigations that are situated in contexts of literary history and media changes.