Aristotle's Ethos In The One With The Ungi

500 Words2 Pages

Aristotle’s Poetics served a building-block and ethical guide for future authors, playwrights, and even the audience. For years to come, Poetics would shape the foundation in which all stories and plots were formed. Any variation from the literary scientific method presented in Poetics would result in loss of credibility and the literary work would be deemed “incorrect.” Fastword to the second millennium, popular television series Friends releases their 17th episode for their sixth season. The basis of this episode, “The One with the Unagi”, follows play-by-play Aristotle’s Poetics. One of the theories presented in Aristotle’s Poetics is what is called ethos, or the characters in the drama. Aristotle describes the requirements of ethos; …show more content…

Yet, in the plot, we see several brief shifts within characters that cause them to navigate outside of Aristotle’s theory and quickly morphing back to the structure of Aristotle’s ten basic concepts. Muthos represents the modern terminology for “plot.” Aristotle defines it as, “the representation of the action...the structure of incidents...the origin...some are simple and some are complex” (93-95). In comparison to the plot of “The One with Unagi”, there are several indications of the plot on the chronological timeline. However, the origin of the plot begins with two main predicaments: Ross is trying to prove that self-defense stems from Unagi and he tries to enforce its practice on Rachel and Phoebe. The other perplexity of this plot it that both Monica and Chandler agreed to make Valentine’s Day gifts for their belated celebration, but both scrambled the day of their date to find a gift that they could pass off as homemade. Joey, on the other hand, is struggling to come up with cash for acting portraits and decides to enter medical research