You all have done so fantastically on connotation and denotation--really!--that I need to throw climax your way.

I think figuring out what is the climax in stories is one of the hardest tasks kids have to do. The defintions will make anyone loony.

The 'strictest sense' falls apart because creative writers aren't going to be boxed up--yet English teachers do like their little boxes.

Part of the confusion lies with Shakespeare's time in which the climax should occur in the third act of the tragedies. It was simply the way things were. (Are there any exceptions to this rule in Shakespeare's tragedies, I wonder? There was some very esoteric pyramid mentioned that I should look up--Freitag's pyramid, I think it was referred to in analyzing the tragedies...)

There are the 'turning point' climaxes and the 'moments of greatest emotional intensity' climaxes--but, you know, sometimes the climax is so terribly subtle and not terrifically emotional at all on the outside, but very much so on the inside.

I realize that all of this could be taken with a louche turn of mind, but that is not my intention at all.

What I'd really like are some classic examples--and definitely nothing very subtle--of dramas, short stories and so on--in which once the climax is reached, whether subtle turning point or great emotion, the action speeds up like mad, kind of like traveling to the top of a roller coaster and then screaming your head off all the way down (falling action). Sometimes--too often--the falling action occurs too quickly to even warrant much discussion. However, if you can think of an example of a story or play in which the falling action is terrifically intense, please mention it here. I'd love to use that roller coaster metaphor in class.