Leaving out pieces of plot is a crucial part of writing, and it is a shame that it is not practiced as much as it should be. Many well-known best-sellers have made their authors famous through their extravagant plots and narratives, but one of the least appreciated mechanics of writing is that of omission. Some wonder how a story can possibly be bettered by leaving out details, and that confusing the readers is not a good way to entice them or tell a story, but on the contrary, omission of details allows the reader to fill in the blanks with their imagination, forcing them to apply critical thinking and feel accomplished when they produce theories as to what had happened between two events. Theorizing is an amazing tool that forces readers to become stuck in the story and feel like they are inside the tale they are reading, some such epics are those in the books A Streetcar Named Desire, The Great Gatsby, and Open City by Tennessee Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Teju Cole, respectively. The first of the tales in which omission can be found as a driving force to the story is that of the young Jay Gatsby, a ‘New Money’ man of considerable wealth, who lives an extravagant life in the West Egg, hosting parties for complete strangers during the era of the “Roaring Twenties” (1920s).
To begin with, The Great Gatsby follows Jay Gatsby, a mysterious figure whom many have never laid eyes on, and the host of many celebrations in what we know as the Great Neck Peninsula on Long Island. The story follows along Gatsby’s exploits through the eyes of Nick Carraway, the narrator who also plays a part as a sort of friend to Gatsby in the story. The story revolves around Gatsby’s outlandish behavior and eccentric mannerisms as he displays his wealth through the first half of the book. Things get interesting during the latter portion of the novel, when Gatsby reveals he’s been in love with Daisy Buchannan, wife of Tom Buchannan, an “Old Money” (Inherited Wealth) elite with a nigh-militant demeanor, and a friend of Nick. As events unfold, Daisy and Gatsby wind up running Tom’s mistress over and Gatsby dies shortly after, but that is another story. What makes this piece of plot before the reveal so interesting is that Gatsby has never shown that he was in love with Daisy before, and the reader, with today’s understanding of romance, would have been completely oblivious of the love interest until the end. The effectiveness of the omission of Gatsby’s love for Daisy plays its part right from the start of the book, a feat by Fitzgerald to manage sneaking out such an important detail; the whole driving force of the story. Readers, along with the characters themselves, are taken for a journey as they read along to figure out why Gatsby throws the parties he through, the characters spouting rumors about him being a war general, or a scheming businessman, bored of his rich life, and soon after the reader themselves starts formulating ideas about who he might be and why he does what he does. All these mysteries surrounding the man, along with the rumors building on his character contribute to this being one of the staples of American Literature, mixing the rendition of the past with a mystery-filled, adventure of a novel, all because the story left out Gatsby’s love for Daisy, and his upbringing, from the start. But The Great Gatsby is not the only work of literature to be impacted so strongly by a redaction of information; that fact falls also on the story of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Stanley is a man well into his thirties, having been an army engineer in World War II, and currently working as a Factory Parts Salesman. The play tells a story of Stanley, a hotheaded man’s man, with his wife, Stella; a sweet woman of timid nature, weak and vulnerable to Stanley’s uncontrolled rage. The story follows the daily life of the two until Stella’s sister, Blanche, arrives. Once Blanche makes herself an inhabitant of their home, Stanley begins to act more and more wild, unleashing violent behavior and erratic outbursts at his friends, wife, and sister-in-law for nearly every little infraction he witnesses. The story swells up to one night, when Stella is away from home. Stanley and Blanche have an argument, and Blanche recedes to the bathroom in an effort to get away from Stanley, but Stanley won’t have it; kicking and screaming, he carries Blanche to the bedroom and the scene cuts to curtains. The story takes a dark twist from here on out, the play refuses to state it outright, but the scene left out was that in which Stanley rapes Blanche. The reader is thrown in a void for a moment, oblivious to what just happened, and stunned once they piece together the clues. From there on in, the story takes a much darker turn as Stanley devolves into a spiral of violence, and eventually strikes Stella, causing a falling out as the story wraps up henceforth. The omission here was a small one, but the effect of it was so great that anyone conducting a second reading of the story would be reading an entirely new book, one that shows the story of not a man, but an animal; a despicable man who does horrific acts on a whim. Streetcar Named Desire gives another clever use of omission in order to affect how we read the story, albeit this one was more sudden and caused a greater shift in the tone of the narrative, so much so that the one scene left out changes the entire book’s unfolding of events.
To conclude, while many ways to improve stories and attract readers exist, the use of omitting certain elements and scenes from the story can prove to be just as effective when setting up a twist or explanation for the plot, if not more, than other literary devices. This amazing use of cutting details from the narrative has been shown through the stories of Jay Gatsby and Stanley Kowalski in The Great Gatsby and Streetcar Named Desire to great effect, twisting their meaning into something entirely new, while stimulating the reader with food for thought. Overall it was amazing and very immersive to be given holes in plot to do detective work on in an effort to figure out how the plot fits into itself.