In Pamela Robertson Wojcik’s “What makes the apartment complex?”, the role that the apartment plot plays as a genre in developing a narrative is explored. There are several distinctive features that an apartment plot can contribute to its narrative, from voyeurism to simultaneity. Even though the apartment is a hallmark of urban life, it cannot actually function as a broader representation of the city in which it is set. Instead, it serves as a “microcosm of the city” in that it focuses on a narrative that is representative of one particular sector of the population, distinguished by characteristics such as class or race (Wojcik 4). By employing one specific instance of the urban narrative, it sheds the anonymity of the massive urban landscape in order to present a story that, paradoxically, “suggests that each story is one among the millions possible” (Wojcik 4). Furthermore, the apartment plot goes so far as to “map the protagonist’s identity into his or her spatial location”, rendering the urban narrative as told through the lens of the apartment plot inextricable from the characters central to the aforementioned narrative (Wojcik, 4). Indeed, context frames both the story and the characters within. Adelaide Chen, 3035611054