Natural curiosity - to find out what and why things happen - is the main reason for reading or listening to a narrative, and a narrative basically is an account of a series of events linked by cause and effect; inasmuch as there is a strong emphasis on cause and effect, this chain of events can also be referred to as plot, another term which has been widely discussed and probed. Traditional narrative theory focuses on the role of the writer in choosing, emphasizing and explaining the rational links between plot events, and more recent critics have stressed the way that the reader accepts, rejects, infers or imagines the links. Margaret Drabble's novels vary in the amount of interpretation required of the reader: even in an early novel like A Summer Bird-Cage where the reasons for events are carefully explained, there is still an area of uncertainty for the reader as to the motives of the characters; and conversely, even in the later The Middle Ground, which avoids a final solution, some firm and convincing reasons for its characters’ behaviour appear.

As the title of A Natural Curiosity implies, curiosity about causes is important in revealing the workings of the plot, and the power and limitation of curiosity about causes is probed and explored. ‘I want to know what really happened’ (NC 75) says one of the characters in that novel, and the possibility of finding out what and why things happen is a goal to which characters themselves repeatedly address themselves, though often to be frustrated. Margaret Drabble has said:

This means that cause and effect are foregrounded, as the characters probe into their past, and although it is not true that all Drabble's novels reject forward-moving plots, large parts of most of them are taken up with reminiscences, memories, investigations, family histories and other material that could help to give a clarification of why the character has reached this stage in his or her life.