Falling Action: Against 'Freytag's Pyramid'

Abstract: Academic experts on narrative structure and the novel rarely use "Freytag's pyramid" in our own research, but we have not objected to its universal use in public school English classes, believing it to be a legitimate part of our discipline's history. The pyramid model now attributed to Gustav Freytag was not really Freytag's work, however, and its adoption by schools was never approved by scholars but instead resulted from historical accident and bureaucratic mandate. The misleading idea that a single plot structure underlies all fiction should be deprecated for classroom teaching and replaced with more accurate and culturally diverse models of storytelling.