"As literary critics have long pointed out, the arbitrary yoking together of events in the service of storytelling is one of the fundamental characteristics of all narrative.(...) The audience's willing surrender to narrative coincidence is demanded by the story's need to conclude itself. But Lucas takes this self-consciousness about narrative artifice a step further: He makes explicit his theoretical interest in the mechanics of plot. As viewers, we take pleasure in the implausible events that must happen for the narrative contraption to snap shut in a satisfying way. But the characters come to understand that there is another agent, external to themselves, that is dictating the action. The Force is, in other words, a metaphor for, or figuration of, the demands of narrative. The Force is the power of plot."

Over at Slate