（1）The Don was a real man at the age of twelve.Short,dark,slender,living in the strange Moorish-looking village of Corleone in Sicily,he had been born Vito Andolini,but when strange men came to kill the son of the man they had murdered,his mother sent the young boy to America to stay with friends.And in the new land he changed his name to Corleone to preserve some tie with his native village.It was one of the few gestures of sentiment he was ever to make.
In Sicily at the turn of the century the Mafia was the second government,far more powerful than the official one in Rome.Vito Corleone's father became involved in a feud with another village who took his case to Mafia.The father refused to knuckle under and in a public quarrel killed the local Mafia chief.A week later he himself was found dead,his body torn apart by lupara blasts.A month after the funeral Mafiia gunmen came inquiring after the young boy,Vito.They had decided that he was too close to manhood,that he might try to avenge the death of this father in the years to come.The twelve-year-old Vito was hidden by relatives and shipped to America.There he was boarded with the Abbandandos,whose son Genco was later to become Consigliere to his Don.
Young Vito went to work in the Abbandando grocery store on Ninth Avenue in New York's Hill's Kitchen.At the age of eighteen Vito married an Italian girl freshly arrived from Sicily,a girl of only sixteen but a skilled cook,a good housewife.They settled down in tenement on Tenth Avenue,near 35th Street,only a few blocks from where Vito worked,and two years later were blessed with their first child,Santino,called by all his friends Sonny because of his devotion to his father.（Mario Puzo,The Godfather）
（2）My father was always away during the middle of the week,my little brother spent two or three days at a time with my grandmother,who idolized him,and so Grace and I were often alone together.The people who lived in the houses all up and down the street were either related to her or close friends.They were in and out of one another's houses all day long,and several afternoons a week they sat down to bridge tables.Expertly shuffling and reshuffling cards,they went to work.Auction,this was.Contract bridge hadn't yet supplanted it...The women serenely doubled and redoubled each other's bids without ever losing their way in the intricacies of some piece of gossip,and the one who was adding up the score was still able to deplore,with the others,the shockingness of some new novel that they had all put names down for at the library.（William Maxwell,So Long,See You Tomorrow）
In the first passage,an example of sequential summary,the three paragraphs relate events in their sequence but compress them:that is what happened to the godfather,from the age of twelve when his father was killed and he was sent to America,to eighteen when he was married,to twenty when the first child was born—eight years of life covered in three short paragraphs.The second passage,an example of circumstantial summary,describes the general circumstances during a period of time:this is how things were,this is what usually happened to the narrator when he was a boy;his salesman father was away,his younger brother stayed with his grandmother,his stepmother Grace played bridge with her friends in the house,gossiping pleasantly.
In both passages we see characters carefully developed:the godfather who is both the victim and beneficiary of the circumstances,and the sensitive young boy who feels overwhelmingly lonely.However,characterization,and story,for that matter,rely more on scene than summary.Burrouway comments pithily on the relative importance of the two narrative strategies:
Summary is a useful and often necessary device:to give information,fill in a character's background,let us understand a motive,alter pace,create a transition,leap moments or years.Scene is always necessary to fiction.A confrontation,a turning point,or a crisis occurs at given moments that take on significance as moments and cannot be summarized.The form of a story requires confrontation,turning points,and therefore requires scenes.It is quite possible to write a short story in a single scene,without any summary at all.It is not possible to write a successful story entirely in summary.（Writing Fiction）
Scene is where characters show（speak and act）and present themselves to the reader.The following story"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"illustrates how the main character is characterized in a series of scenes.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty——James Thurber
"We're going through!"The Commander's voice was like thin ice breaking.He wore his full-dress uniform,with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye."We can't make it,sir.It's spoiling for a hurricane,if you ask me.""I'm not asking you,Lieutenant Berg,"said the Commander."Throw on the power lights!Rev her up to 8,500!We're going through!"The pounding of the cylinders increased:ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.The Commander stared at the ice forming on the pilot window.He walked over and twisted a row of complicated dials."Switch on No.8 auxiliary!"he shouted."Switch on No.8 auxiliary!"repeated Lieutenant Berg."Full strength in No.3 turret!"shouted the Commander."Full strength in No.3 turret!"The crew,bending to their various tasks in the huge,hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane,looked at each other and grinned."The old man will get us through,"they said to one another."The Old Man ain't afraid of Hell!"...
"Not so fast!You're driving too fast!"said Mrs.Mitty."What are you driving so fast for?"