Beginning of my plot paper

This is an article I've been wanting to write for a long time -- a sort of a rebuttal of the "Against Craft" article published in the AWP Chronicle 3 years ago. (Has it really been that long?)

The entire concept is based on the work of Thomas Pynchon -- specifically, The Crying of Lot 49, and my summation of the Pynchon Dilemna: conspiracy vs. chaos.

Here's the beginning of the paper -- hope it makes sense. Still a lot of work to do before it's whole and sound.

Thoughts on plot and plotlessness
During one of my first undergraduate fiction seminars, my professor told us not to end our stories in a way that makes sense. "An open-ended ending," he said, somewhat tautologically, "is far more memorable. It sticks in the reader's mind much longer than an ending that comes tied up in a neat little string." As an example, he cited J.D. Salinger's "Just Before the War With the Eskimos," the end of which is the main character deciding not to throw away an egg salad sandwich.
This puzzled me. Then again, many of the stories my professor assigned for reading and discussion puzzled me. I come from a working-class Ozark background. Stories were a staple of my childhood: stories told for entertainment and for instruction. On Wednesdays, the Bible ladies brought flannelboards to our classrooms and told us ancient stories about God. These stories had cause and effect - the escaped Hebrews worshipped a golden cow, so none of them was to see the promised land. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, so they had to move out of Eden.
College stories were different. Take Kafka's "In the Penal Colony." The anthropologist flees after witnessing the horrors of the penal colony, driving off the prisoners who attempt to climb aboard his boat. Or Bowles's "A Distant Mirror," where the linguist is mutilated, and ends up a mute freak who frightens children. "Going To Meet the Man." "Hills Like White Elephants." "Popular Mechanics." The list goes on.
These stories, though classics, made me wrinkle my forehead. "Huh?" I wondered if I was missing something. I read again and again, made copious notes in margins. I learned to appreciate irony (even the bitter taste of Kafka's brand), to pay attention to detail, to dig deeper into the imagined lives of characters. But I never truly believed, in my heart, that these were stories. Of course there were exceptions to this general rule -- stories I truly enjoyed, like "The Things They Carried" and Robert Olen Butler's exceptional "Love." Only much later did it occur to me to wonder, why did I like some stories and not others?

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