most of them. She resents the situation in which she exists but doesn't fight the system openly at the beginning of the book - she works for change in quiet ways, as she shapes Mae Mobley.

"'So we's the same. Just a different color', say that little colored girl. The little white girl she agreed and they was friends. The End."...Mae Mobley, she smile and say, "Tell it again.”

Minnie is young and angry. She is eager to fight the structure of expectations and prejudices, but needs the income of being employed and understands that she is jeopardizing her future employment status when she steps outside of the usual pattern of the black servant.

“What you think I am? A chauffeur? I ain’t driving you to no country club in the pouring rain.”

The one chapter in the book not told from the viewpoint of one of these three characters describes the Junior League Banquet. That chapter is written from a third person perspective, strictly as a report of the events of the evening.

This novel is structured as a "roman a clef" (a novel about real situations rendered as a fiction) with an emphasis on suspense. 

Arranged in chapters that cycle between three different first-person narrators (each with inter-related but distinct story-lines), the novel uses personal conflict, social conflict and professional conflict to create a high degree of tension. 

One of the novel's key literary devices is its use of dramatic irony. The audience often has information that some of the characters in the novel do not have, creating a situation where the audience anticipates the moment that these characters will discover that information.

This can be seen in the Awful Terrible as well as in the extended period that the book is being put together. Minny and Aibileen and the reader have information here that Miss Hilly and Miss Leefolt do not. This use of dramatic irony effectively creates tension and is used so often in the text that it should be included in any discussion of the novel's structure. 

Two events serve to orient the novel's action and create anticipation - the Benefit and the publication of the book. These events are projected long before they occur, allowing them to build tension and to provide the novel with a clear sense of direction.

The Help is a work of historical fiction set in Jackson, Mississippi, during the years 1962-1964. The time and place are marked by the strong racial divide between white and black people. The Jim Crow laws are still in effect. The American civil rights movement is just beginning. A key juxtaposition lies in the fact that most white households here employ black maids. At its core, this book offers insights in how women from the two races live and work under such circumstances: together yet separately, and certainly not equally.

The storyline unfolds in chapters told by three characters: Aibileen Clark, Minny Jackson, and Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan. Aibileen and Minny are maids. Skeeter is a young white woman who just graduated from Ole Miss. She grew up in Jackson, but after college sees her hometown with fresh eyes. She’s disturbed by the way her friends treat “the help.” Eventually, she interviews a number of the maids, including Aibileen and Minny, in order to publish a book about the relationships between maids and their employers in an unnamed city in the Deep South. The time is right for people to start talking about such things. By the end of the story, all three main characters have undergone changes in their lives. Aibileen—whose chapters both begin and end this book—may be considered the touchstone character and the one who is the most changed, both emotionally and intellectually. She has a wide-open future ahead of her.

You can also catch glimpses of the women’s rights movement here. Skeeter longs to land a job as a journalist, while all the other women in the Jackson Junior League focus on landing husbands, having children, and managing their households, including the staff. By the end of the 1960s, the ratio of working to stay-at-home women will have begun to change.

The narrative structure of The Help includes sections narrated in the first person by Aibileen, Minny, and Miss Skeeter. Each person has a very different voice and an individual perspective on the events unfolding in the story, as Aibileen and Minny are African American maids while Skeeter is a college-educated white woman. Aibileen has a first-hand perspective on what is happening in the Leefolt house, while Minny is privy to the secrets of Celia Foote. Miss Skeeter narrates what occurs among the white women she is friends with, including Elizabeth and Hilly. Each person has a different perspective on the early Civil Rights movement unfolding in Mississippi in the early 1960s. 

The narrative structure provides a voice for the African American domestics that Skeeter is also trying to capture in the book she is writing for Missus Stein, her New York editor. The Help is a book within a book, as it is both a narration of how Skeeter is writing her book and a kind of replica of what she is writing. 

The narrative structure of this excellent and poignantly moving novel is based around the first person account of three women who are the principal protagonists in the story. Skeeter is the one white woman out of the three characters who works with two black women working as maids, Aibileen and Minnie, to capture the narrative of their experiences over the years as black women working for white families as maids. The first person narrative from each of these characters greatly endears them to us as readers, as they discuss their feelings and motives. Included in their accounts, of course, are a number of flashbacks as the various characters remember events that have a bearing on the present. One example of this would be Skeeter's memories of her maid when she was a child and her attempts to establish what happened to her and why she vanished so abruptly. Another would be the flashback that Aibileen has as she remembers the circumstances surrounding her son's tragic accident. The way in which the three accounts are woven together, and at times each of the characters comment on the other two, adds real depth and profundity to this excellent novel.

The Help is written in first person perspective but has three speakers taking turns doing the talking. Aibilene, Minnie and Skeeter each add their voices to the telling of the story, with the speaker identified through the listing of her name at the start of the section of chapters she is narrating. The one exception to the first person narration is the description of the Junior League Benefit, which is delivered from a third party perspective.

The plot of the book is the interaction between white women of Jackson, Mississippi and their black maids in the early 1960's. Aibilene and Minnie retell their observations and thoughts about the women they work for and observe visiting their employers, share the challenges of their lifestyle with each other, and debate how to approach the possibility of changing the system as the civil rights movement gains strength. Skeeter grew in a different direction from her high school friends when she went away to college, and has now returned home to find herself an outsider, no longer interested in being a part of the social circle or lifestyle being followed by her white friends. When she decides to attempt to write a book in the form of a series of interviews of black maids talking about their relationships with their employers, she enters a world of risk and unexpected revelations. The Help is a chronological record of the process leading to the writing of Skeeter's book and recording its immediate aftermath.

Several notable narratives features enter into discussions of this novel. The most prominent of these will be the use of first-person narrative perspective through multiple characters, use of dialect, and dramatic irony. 

The novel cycles between the first-person narratives of three characters - Aibileen, Skeeter, and Minny. Using multiple characters to narrate a text is uncommon, though not unheard of. William Faulkner used this method of story-telling in As I Lay Dying. 

Another notable feature of the text is its use of dialect as it constitutes the narrative voices of Minny and Aibileen. While Stockett has received criticism for choosing to voice only the African American characters in dialect and not the Caucasian narrator Skeeter (who is just as Southern and in her dialogue sections speaks with dialect too). 

Tension and anticipation are key elements of the text as well. Stockett demonstrates a keen ability to create tension by using dramatic irony. This occurs when the reader is aware of certain things that some characters in the story are not. As a narrative device, Stockett uses this information discrepency to create tension throughout the novel within each separate story-line. (The reader is often aware that Aibileen and Minny and Skeeter have done something for which they may be caught. The reader then anticipates the moment when Hilly and others will become aware of these acts.)