climax, (Greek: “ladder”), in dramatic and nondramatic fiction, the point at which the highest level of interest and emotional response is achieved.
In rhetoric, climax is achieved by the arrangement of units of meaning (words, phrases, clauses, or sentences) in an ascending order of importance. The following passage from Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) is an example:
All that most maddens and torments; all that
stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice
in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the
brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and
thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly
personified and made practically assailable in
Moby Dick.
In the structure of a play the climax, or crisis, is the decisive moment, or turning point, at which the rising action of the play is reversed to falling action. It may or may not coincide with the highest point of interest in the drama. In the influential pyramidal outline of five-act dramatic structure, advanced by the German playwright Gustav Freytag in Die Technik des Dramas (1863), the climax, in the sense of crisis, occurs close to the conclusion of the third act. By the end of the 19th century, when the traditional five-act drama was abandoned in favour of the three-act, both the crisis and the emotional climax were placed close to the end of the play.