Writing Help 129 | - ☆ Freelance Writer
Apr 05, 2013 | #1
Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel
These is one of those key concepts that you can not fail to avoid as you are making your way through the educational system, and most of us have it defined for us early in our teen years or before. Despite this fact, many of us have a difficult time coming up with the theme or themes of a given novel or story, and I believe this has to do with a basic misunderstanding of what the term means based on simplistic definitions.
In its simplest manifestation, a theme of a story can be equated with its "lesson" "moral," or "take-home message." For example, in a novel based on the actions of a gang leader who gets shot and dies by the end, the moral might be "don't join a gang" or "don't use drugs," or more positively, "stay in school." All of these can be seen as themes, but novels are such complex entities that before you state a moral as the overarching theme of a work, make sure you have investigated other possibilities as well.
A theme is more than the potential message of a work, and a moral needn't even be present in order for a theme to be. In fact, while every novel I have ever read contains at least one, but most often several, themes, very few novels (especially modern ones) have an identifiable moral. So, while lessons and morals can serve as themes, they do not completely define the range of options that a theme can occupy.
A theme is a basic idea that underlies a novel and serves as a guide to its progression; the most effective novels will present and intertwine several themes, and every page will work towards forwarding one or more of these themes and their interactions. This is a broad definition, but theme needs to be broadly defined because it can range from the very general to the specific. One often used and well known example of a theme is love. The theme of love is one that runs through the entirety of literature's history, and you will be hard pressed to find a narrative work produced in the 20th century which doesn't include love among its themes. Now, love is about as general as a theme gets, and often novelists will use more specific varieties of love in creating a more focused work. Unrequited love, where love is completely one-sided, is a common theme, as is adulterous love, other kinds of forbidden love, and the game of love, where characters engage in complex interactions and manipulations in their pursuit of each other.
Taking a cue from the example of love above, my recommendation for finding and analyzing themes in a given novel is to begin with the broadest categories possible, and examine them till you discover narrower and narrower themes. For example, one of the dominant themes in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is European colonizing. Looking more specifically, we find that the novel deals with the problems and limitations of colonialization. Going even deeper, we see that the problems of colonizing result in a strict division between natives and Europeans, which turns our attention to the problems of a dehumanizing racism which haunts the colonizing project and renders the natives effectively inhuman. One you have a preliminary thematic hierarchy, you can find specific examples of events which take place on each level, and then examine each event to see if it reveals a separate series of themes. In this way, you will come up with the interrelations between different thematic threads in the novel, and your analysis will move far beyond the simple location of morals and lessons.
Theme
These is one of those key concepts that you can not fail to avoid as you are making your way through the educational system, and most of us have it defined for us early in our teen years or before. Despite this fact, many of us have a difficult time coming up with the theme or themes of a given novel or story, and I believe this has to do with a basic misunderstanding of what the term means based on simplistic definitions.
In its simplest manifestation, a theme of a story can be equated with its "lesson" "moral," or "take-home message." For example, in a novel based on the actions of a gang leader who gets shot and dies by the end, the moral might be "don't join a gang" or "don't use drugs," or more positively, "stay in school." All of these can be seen as themes, but novels are such complex entities that before you state a moral as the overarching theme of a work, make sure you have investigated other possibilities as well.A theme is more than the potential message of a work, and a moral needn't even be present in order for a theme to be. In fact, while every novel I have ever read contains at least one, but most often several, themes, very few novels (especially modern ones) have an identifiable moral. So, while lessons and morals can serve as themes, they do not completely define the range of options that a theme can occupy.
A theme is a basic idea that underlies a novel and serves as a guide to its progression; the most effective novels will present and intertwine several themes, and every page will work towards forwarding one or more of these themes and their interactions. This is a broad definition, but theme needs to be broadly defined because it can range from the very general to the specific. One often used and well known example of a theme is love. The theme of love is one that runs through the entirety of literature's history, and you will be hard pressed to find a narrative work produced in the 20th century which doesn't include love among its themes. Now, love is about as general as a theme gets, and often novelists will use more specific varieties of love in creating a more focused work. Unrequited love, where love is completely one-sided, is a common theme, as is adulterous love, other kinds of forbidden love, and the game of love, where characters engage in complex interactions and manipulations in their pursuit of each other.
Taking a cue from the example of love above, my recommendation for finding and analyzing themes in a given novel is to begin with the broadest categories possible, and examine them till you discover narrower and narrower themes. For example, one of the dominant themes in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is European colonizing. Looking more specifically, we find that the novel deals with the problems and limitations of colonialization. Going even deeper, we see that the problems of colonizing result in a strict division between natives and Europeans, which turns our attention to the problems of a dehumanizing racism which haunts the colonizing project and renders the natives effectively inhuman. One you have a preliminary thematic hierarchy, you can find specific examples of events which take place on each level, and then examine each event to see if it reveals a separate series of themes. In this way, you will come up with the interrelations between different thematic threads in the novel, and your analysis will move far beyond the simple location of morals and lessons.