Book Review: The art of fiction by David Lodge (Penguin) - Part 6

Here are my favourite quotes/notes. I also added videos and/or links. This should not deter you from reading the whole book which is made up of texts and explanations and is fascinating and engaging.

15 - Surprise

Most narratives contain an element of surprise. If we can predict every twist in a plot, we are unlikely to be gripped by it. But the twists must be convincing as well as unexpected. Aristotle called this effect peripeteia, or reversal, the sudden shift from one state of affairs to its opposite, often combined with "discovery", the transformation of a charatcer's ignorance into kwowledge.

How to use the element of surprise.

16 - Time-shift

The simplest way to tell a story, equaly favoured by tribal bards and parents at bedtime, is to begin at the beginning, and go on until you reach the end, or your audience falls asleep. But even in antiquity, storytellers perceived the interesting effects that could be obtained by deviating from chronological order. The classical epic began in medias res, in the midst of the story.
Through time-shift, narrative avoids presenting life as just one damn thing after another, and allows us to make connections of causality and irony between widely separated events.  shift of narrative focus back in time may change our interpretation of something which happened much later in the chronology of the story, but which we have already experienced as readers of the text.
Film has more difficulty in accomodating the effect of "flashforward" -- the anticipatory glimpse of what is going to happen in the future of the narrative, known as "prolepsis".

Analepsis and prolepsis.

17 - The Reader in the text

Every novel must have a narrator, however impersonal, but not necessarily a narratee. The narratee is any evocation of, or surrogate for, the reader of the novel within the text itself.
This can be as casual as the Victorian novelist's familiar apostrophe, "Dear reader", or as elaborate as the frame of Kipling's "Mrs Bathurst", [...] in which the "I" narrator is also the narratee of a story told by three other characters who themselves are constantly swapping the two roles. Italo Calvino begins his If on a winter's night a traveller by exhorting his reader to get into a receptive mood: "Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room." But a narratee, however constituted, is always a rhetorical device, a means of controlling and complicating the responses of the real reader who remains outside the text.

Question 
Which is the best element of surprise you have found in a novel?