Parenthesis

As I was reading tonight I came upon a word related to my last post on interpolation: parenthesis. Perhaps this is a more technical term for inserting something extraneous in a sentence or passage or chapter, or maybe it is a subclass of interpolation.

Like other words I previously associated only with punctuation marks- e.g., ellipsis - it can be used in a broader sense, or "scaled up," to refer to long passages of text that break the march of a narrative or essay.

Wikipedia tells us the words rhetorical roots of parenthesis (as opposed to its use to denote punctuation) are a Greek word (which I couldn't read because it was in Greek letters)that means "alongside of" and "to place."

It defines parenthesis as an "explanatory or qualifying word, clause, or sentence inserted into a passage with which it doesn't necessarily have any grammatical connection, and from which it is usually marked off by round or square brackets, dashes, or commas."

It's fascinating that words used to describe punctuation might be used to describe the macro-structure of narrative. Ellipsis: things left out. Parenthesis: things inserted.

So a story that skips several years between two successive chapters, can be said to contain an ellipsis. A chapter that recounts an event outside the flow of the narrative contains a parenthesis. A flashback might even be considered a parenthesis. So the portion of the story that was skipped earlier between chapters, could be recounted later parenthetically.

By the way, the structure of the current story I'm working on follows this pattern. It's three parts. The first part begins in media res, then flashes back to a summary of the stories history prior to that first scene, then comes forward to the "current time" again.

The second part begins weeks after the first part ended, then flashes back to summarize the ellipsis between the end of the first part and the beginning of the second part, then jumps forward a couple of weeks to another scene.

The last part, which I'm still writing, you'll be happy to know, and I'm happy to do it, though I've been writing it for a while and it's wearing on me a bit, like the time I barely finished high school and afterwards had nightmares of uniformed men coming to my house and dragging me back to school...that last part will follow the same structure as the second part.