Summary & Response Paper

Professor Lavarini

The Freytag Pyramid

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1) Exposition or Introduction: The beginning of the drama introduces the setting, characters, situations, and conflicts. Stage directions may present the play’s background and characters, but usually the dramatic dialogue by both minor and major characters best describes the inner workings (traits and motives) of characters, as well as the situations, plans, back stories in the play.

2) Complication and Development/Rising Action: This stage marks the beginning of problems for characters in the play. What is occurring that makes THIS day in the characters’ lives different? What new knowledge is gained that changes the situation in the play? For example, in The Great Gatsby, Daisy becomes upset when Tom’s mistress calls their home during dinner, and Nick is shocked to discover the state of his cousin’s marriage.

3) Crisis and Climax: The pressure reaches its greatest intensity at this point, making this the turning point because the protagonist must make a decision. Once the decision is made, the play’s uncertainty ends and the inevitability begins. In The Great Gatsby, the scene in the hotel room on a hot summer’s day is an intense scene when Daisy is forced to choose between Tom and Gatsby.

4) Falling Action: The results of the decision(s) made during the crisis begin to become clear, but often the falling action is a time of delay until the end of the play. In Gatsby, Daisy runs over Myrtle, Gatsby waits for the phone call/visit from Daisy that never comes, and the other characters wrap up their summer together.

5) Dénouement, Resolution, or Catastrophe: The dénouement means “unraveling” and resolution means the “untying”: the knots or problems are resolved in this final stage. If the protagonists undergo suffering or death, then the end is known as the catastrophe, as when all the main characters are dead by the end of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. In The Great Gatsby, the title’s character is shot by George, who then kills himself. Tom and Daisy move on, and Nick moves home to the Midwest as a sadder but wiser thirty-year-old.