ABSTRACT
We have already seen that the fictional stories told in each of the romances are founded upon a restricted and recurrent group of events and situations (a prince's quest, the initiation into love, the separation of lovers through actual or simulated death, and so on). When the story told belongs to fiction rather than to history, the selection of events and situations to narrate, and their arrangement into a pattern, or 'plot', belongs not to the world of the imagined events themselves, but to the activity of the author in creating his literary text or narrative. For the purposes of this section it is not so much the recurrent events that we will be considering as the formal pattern or narrative structure created in each of the romances by the choice and arrangement of events to be narrated, and also the manner of their narration.
