How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

In this chapter, Foster discusses how writers use weather to signify certain meanings. He focuses on rain but says the same principles apply to any other kind of weather or atmospheric condition. Readers should understand how rain can shape a story and then pay attention to other clues. Rain can drive the plot, provide a certain mood, make life miserable for people, act as a common phenomenon (it falls everywhere, on everyone), and be a cleansing agent. Rain can portend something bad (gloomy, dangerous) or promise something good (renewing, springlike). Moreover, rain can be associated with the biblical myth of the Flood and Noah’s ark. The significance of the weather depends on the other elements of a story and how they impact each other. 

Here the author examines character and, by extension, plot, which are two major elements of narrative. People relate to other people, so readers take interest in characters, who must behave according to the terms of the plot. At the same time, Foster argues, it’s important to remember that characters are not real, only products of the imagination—both the author’s and the reader’s. For readers to care about a character that doesn’t exist, they have to imbue that character with hopes, dreams, and feelings of their own: