In Aspects of the Novel, Forster says that the novel should be an aesthetic whole combining form and value and having a story as its backbone in this self-contained structure there must be an internal harmony which needs the adjustmentof characters to one another and adapting them to the story, the plot, the atmosphere of the novel and so on.
The novelist in trying to give a sense of invetability, resorts to plot. It is a narrative of events in which the emphasis falls upon causality and which is the novel in its logical intellectual aspects. Meanwhile, the writer wishes to have everything in the novel founded on human nature, in other words founded on the character's will. The difficulty facing the novelist here is the way of achieving both the sense of inveitability and the human nature. This according to Forsster, can be done successfully when an incident springs out of the character and having occurred a;ters character, and having occurred alters character to connect people and events closely.
It has been rightly noted by Lord David Cecil that "not character or probability, but the thesis Forster wishes to expound determines the main lines of his plot's structure", This is to an extent true since most of the characters, especially his herces, cannot be categorized as round or flat. Ansell in The Longest Journey Ruth Wilcox in Howards End and Mrs. Moor in A Passage to India serve as examples. They are memorable for a grouping of qualites not for a dimension, or, as Mr. James McConkey says "they have been constructed to represent a portion of Forster's own insight, to suggest a portion of that vision which the novel as a whole represents".
Another point concerning character and from is that Forster shifts viewpoint from character to another and from character to his own postion. This method serves, as he affirms to bounce the reader into accepting what he says. This method also results in making Forster's voice quite clear element in the novel's form. As far as the story is concerned, Forster says in Aspects of the Novel, that voice 'transforms us fron readers into listeners to whom a voice speaks." Such a voice assumes the dimension of a major character in all Forster's nivels we are aware of it as we are aware of Margaret Schiegel and Fielding.
Such richness of elements and possibilities Forster sees for the novel makes him stand against rigid pattern. "Pattern" he says. "spring mainly out of the pict and characters and all else in the novel contribute to it." The rigid pattern cannot cope with the richness of the material that life provides