tar-ancalime said:
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Well, I think that quite a lot of them probably were. One of the wonderful things about fiction (as opposed to journalism) is that in a work of fiction, absolutely everything is there because the author put it there. The author has total control over his/her world--if the main character has red hair, it's because the author wanted it that way. S/he's not bound by some external reality of blond or brown hair, and doesn't in fact have to tell the reader anything about hair color at all. So I think that we must approach literature with the assumption that anything the author chose to include is in the story on purpose, because that author always had the option of working any element in an infinite number of different ways, or of leaving it out altogether.
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I agree that the author's total control over the story does mean that virtually nothing is accidental. The point I was trying to make was that an author does not exactly sit there with a checklist of all the literary element he or she ought to include (I could, of course, be wrong). If something doesn't seem right or match up with the ideas or images the author had in his/her mind, then s/he will change it, almost instinctively, you could say. S/he might just think, "I'd better change this bit of dialogue here, since this character would never say that," or something to that effect, and then fix the problem. To sum it up, I meant that the insertion of the literary elements/techniques are done more subconsciously, just by the author's judgement, than as a rigid set of rules to be followed.
Am I making any sense?