1. In your introduction, as you lead into your thesis statement, plot or context can enhance your discussion. (This must be CONCISE or else it will detract from your position.) See below for specifics and examples:
* In seventeenth-century Massachusetts, where women already have a limited role in society, Hester Prynne, in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, is isolated and ostracized because she commits the sinful act of adultery.
*In William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, dreams and visions serve as the "portals" through which the characters see the "death-mark'd" future, although their grim meanings cannot be foreseen until too late."
*Russians are unable to breathe under the stifling weight of their history, a history of oppression, suppression and suffering. In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Leo Tolstoy portrays this through his depiction of life in a Stalinist labor camp as a microcosm of the Russian condition.
*The characters in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman live not by the facts of their lives but by illusion, if only to sustain themselves and their own precarious situations.
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2. In your body paragraphs plot summary can help to enlighten your discussion, but only if you are using it to ILLUSTRATE a point. See below for specifics and examples:
Avoid plot summary for its own sake. Whatever may have been the case in high school, in college literature courses you get no particular credit for simply having read and followed the contents of a poem or story or novel. Thus, sentences or paragraphs in which you simply recount what happens or what is said are of no value in a paper about literature.
Exception: If a piece of writing is really tricky to decipher and you feel you've succeeded in doing so after some effort, it may be appropriate to lay your cards on the table. For example, "Stanza 2 is syntactically difficult. I understand it to be saying: ..." -- and give your paraphrase. Or, "What happens next in the story is obscure. From the hints given in the next section, I take it that ..." -- and say what you make out, citing the evidence.Summarizing content in order to make a point in your argument, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter and is very much an appropriate part of papers. Provided that you subordinate the summary to a critical point that you are making, you'll be okay.
Compare:
1. Hamlet then goes to talk with his mother in her bedroom or "closet" and grows more and more angry as he talks to her. Finally, he has a vision of his father's Ghost, and this restores him to some calmness.
2. When Hamlet talks to his mother in her bedroom or "closet," his reproaches to her grow more and more angry and uncontrolled. Ironically, it's only his vision of the Ghost -- which she interprets as his madness -- that restores him to some degree of reasonableness.
In the first version, the writer seems to think that his summary is sufficiently interesting to hold our attention, but it just isn't -- not for anyone who has read the play. In the second version, the bits of summary are made to serve some point of interpretation or comment. To repeat: summary should always be ofered as a way of supporting a point you are making about the story or poem. Ideally, there should be no neutral narrative sentences about the characters or the action, such as "Ferris goes to visit his wife" or "The Duke then conducts his visitor downstairs." Instead, all such bits of summary should be in support of an interpretative point or comment: "When Ferris goes to visit his wife, he discovers that ..." or "The Duke's unpertured courtesy of manner can be heard as he invites his visitor to 'go / Together down' with him," etc.
To put it another way: do not write a paper about the characters in a story; instead write about the story itself -- its words, its shaping or organization, its high points, symbolism, etc.
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