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Write a note on Fielding’s plot construction.

Fielding, a great novelist, was also a great master of plot. Walter Allen has correctly remarked:

“Fielding was as superb craftsman in his own way as Henry James.”

Fielding for the first time, shows the large and firm design in his works. He is the master of his narrative. His whole method is entirely different. He uses-and this is not his least Shakespearean characteristic-an elaborate plot for the development of his figures, suffering them to grow freely and naturally instead of isolating them in a stuffy parlourand encouraging their growth by a constant re-arrangement of the ventilators and attention to the fire fielding shows the faculty of arranging a probable and interesting course of action in a planned and well-kinit manner from the very beginning of his career as novelist. Loosely constructed as ‘Joseph Andrews’ is, it is told with a strongly developed narrative skill ‘Jonathan Wild’ proceeds on a complicated but symmetrical track of its own. Neither of these books, however, prepares the reader for the amazing ‘tour-de-force’ of plot construction in Tom Jones”.

It is a well known fact that the plot of Tom Jones is the most perfect in English fiction; and although there are minor qualifications to this eulogy, the unity and concentration of the novel upon one main plan, and its comparative freedom from digression, are certainly without many parallels. Though like his others novels, Tom Jones also is a novel of character, yet its plot has a very Coherent structure. As Edwin Muir points out-

“The plot of Tom Jones is an adroityly constructed framework for a picture of life, rather, than an unfolding action. The indicents are accurately time; they come in just where they should to suit the scheme of the book, but they are never inevitable, we do not see in them the logic of action, but an exquisitely orderly mind arranging everything for its own purpose.

The plot of Tom Jones thus though not a dramatic plot in its real sense is however, of great importance. Tom Jones is in reality the first English novel conceived and carried out on a structural plant that secured an artistic unity for the whole. It set up for prose fiction a standard which nearly all its great writers have followed and which is to be joinedj practically unchanged in Thaackeray. In Fielding’s novels we find a combination of three types of plot constructions-picarseque, epical, and dramatic. The former dominantes his first two novels Joseph Andrews’ and ‘Joonathan Wild’ and the combination of the last two does his best novel Tom Jones’. The endings of all of his novels remind us of the last act of a well-kine comedy.

“Its (Fielding genius) essence does not lie in his subjects, nor in the incidents worked into his plot.” The fellow has no inventoion’ said. Rchardson disdainfully, and indeed, the basis of these incidents is often borrowed from the common stock of the picaresque novelists or from contemporary life. Butit is in the regrouping of these elements that Fielding’s mastery is so brilliantly manifest. A little clumsy in Jonathan Wild’, which still resembles the usual biographies’, he find his method in ‘Joseaph Andrew’s when he decides to construct his novel according to the principles of dramatic action. The cot of Tom Jones’ is directed on these principles, with a perfection, which is almost too severe, and in ‘Amelia’ under an influence, derived from virgil this severity at last becomes more flexible.”

Inspite of the great workmanship of Fielding certain flows are very obvious in his construction of plots, for instance the flow of introducing some independent stories and episodes having no connection with the real them of the novel.