Chapter 7 Theme
Nothing ever really ends. That’s the horrible part of being in the short-story business — you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. “Millicent at last understands.” Nobody ever understands.
Theme is the central idea or meaning of a story. It provides a unifying point around which the plot, characters, setting, point of view, symbols, and other elements of a story are organized. In some works the theme is explicitly stated. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield,” for example, begins with the author telling the reader that the point of his story is “done up neatly, and condensed into the final sentence.” Most modern writers, however, present their themes implicitly (as Hawthorne does in the majority of his stories), so determining the underlying meaning of a work often requires more effort than it does from the reader of “Wakefield.” One reason for the difficulty is that the theme is fused into the elements of the story, and these must be carefully examined in relation to one another as well as to the work as a whole. But then that’s the value of determining the theme, for it requires a close analysis of all the elements of a work. Such a close reading often results in sharper insights into this overlooked character or that seemingly unrelated incident. Accounting for the details and seeing how they fit together result in greater understanding of the story. Such familiarity creates pleasure in much the same way that a musical piece heard more than once becomes a rich experience rather than simply a repetitive one.
Themes are not always easy to express, but some principles can aid you in articulating the central meaning of a work. First distinguish between the theme of a story and its subject. They are not equivalents. Many stories share identical subjects, such as fate, death, innocence, youth, loneliness, racial prejudice, and disillusionment. T. C. Boyle’s “The Hit Man” and John Updike’s “A & P” both focus on the connection between the main character and his job. Yet each story usually makes its own statement about the subject and expresses a different view of life.
People have different responses to life, and so it is hardly surprising that responses to literature are not identical. When theme is considered, the possibilities for meaning are usually expanded and not reduced to categories such as “right” or “wrong.” Although readers may differ in their interpretations of a story, that does not mean that any interpretation is valid. If we were to assert that the soldier’s dissatisfactions in Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” could be readily eliminated by his settling down to marriage and a decent job (his mother’s solution), we would have missed Hemingway’s purposes in writing the story; we would have failed to see how Krebs’s war experiences have caused him to reexamine the assumptions and beliefs that previously nurtured him but now seem unreal to him. We would have to ignore much in the story in order to arrive at such a reading. To be valid, the statement of the theme should be responsive to the details of the story. It must be based on evidence within the story rather than solely on experiences, attitudes, or values the reader brings to the work — such as personally knowing a war veteran who successfully adjusted to civilian life after getting a good job and marrying. Familiarity with the subject matter of a story can certainly be an aid to interpretation, but it should not get in the way of seeing the author’s perspective.
Sometimes readers too hastily conclude that a story’s theme always consists of a moral, some kind of lesson that is dramatized by the various elements of the work. There are stories that do this — Hawthorne’s “Wakefield,” for example. Here are the final sentences in his story about a middle-aged man who drops out of life for twenty years:
He has left us much food for thought, a portion of which shall lend its wisdom to a moral, and be shaped into a figure. Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. Like Wakefield, he may become, as it were, the Outcast of the Universe.
Most stories, however, do not include such direct caveats about the conduct of life. A tendency to look for a lesson in a story can produce a reductive and inaccurate formulation of its theme. Consider the damage done to Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” if its theme is described this way: “People who imprison and torment children are bad and should not be allowed to enjoy their lives if they do so.” Note that even the title focuses not on the people of Omelas who sanction the suffering of a child, but rather on the ones who walk away from a society who would do that. We don’t know much about those people — who they are, where they go, whether or not they live or die — but their reaction to the situation is significant in determining the story’s theme. In fact, a good many stories go beyond traditional social values to explore human behavior instead of condemning or endorsing it.
Determining the theme of a story can be a difficult task because all the story’s elements may contribute to its central idea. Indeed, you may discover that finding the theme is more challenging than coming to grips with the author’s values as they are revealed in the story. There is no precise formula that can take you to the center of a story’s meaning and help you to articulate it. However, several strategies are practical and useful once you have read the story. Apply these pointers during a second or third reading:
- Pay attention to the title of the story. It often provides a lead to a major symbol (Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home”) or to the subject around which the theme develops (Grace Paley’s “Wants”).
- Look for details in the story that have potential for symbolic meanings. Careful consideration of names, places, objects, minor characters, and incidents can lead you to the central meaning — for example, think of the narrator’s daughter Grace in Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” Be especially attentive to elements you did not understand on the first reading.
- Decide whether the protagonist changes or develops some important insight as a result of the action. Carefully examine any generalizations the protagonist or narrator makes about the events in the story.
- When you formulate the theme of the story in your own words, write it down in one or two complete sentences that make some point about the subject matter. Revenge may be the subject of a story, but its theme should make a statement about revenge: “Instead of providing satisfaction, revenge defeats the best in one’s self ” is one possibility.
- Be certain that your expression of the theme is a generalized statement rather than a specific description of particular people, places, and incidents in the story. Contrast the preceding statement of a theme on revenge with this too-specific one: “In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Roger Chillingworth loses his humanity owing to his single-minded attempts to punish Arthur Dimmesdale for fathering a child with Chillingworth’s wife, Hester.” Hawthorne’s theme is not restricted to a single fictional character named Chillingworth but to anyone whose life is ruined by revenge. Be certain that your statement of theme does not focus on only part of the story. The theme just cited for The Scarlet Letter, for example, relegates Hester to the status of a minor character. What it says about Chillingworth is true, but the statement is incomplete as a generalization about the novel.
- Be wary of using clichés as a way of stating theme. They tend to short-circuit ideas instead of generating them. It may be tempting to resort to something like “money is the root of all evil” as a statement of the theme of Xu Xi’s story “Famine”; however, even the slightest second thought reveals how much more ambiguous that story is.
- Be aware that some stories emphasize theme less than others. Stories that have as their major purpose adventure, humor, mystery, or terror may have little or no theme. In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” for example, the protagonist is not used to condemn torture; instead, he becomes a sensitive gauge to measure the pain and horror he endures at the hands of his captors.
What is most valuable about articulating the theme of a work is the process by which the theme is determined. Ultimately, the theme is expressed by the story itself and is inseparable from the experience of reading the story. Tim O’Brien’s explanation of “How to Tell a True War Story” is probably true of most kinds of stories: “In a true war story, if there’s a moral [or theme] at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning.” Describing the theme should not be a way to consume a story, to be done with it. It is a means of clarifying our thinking about what we’ve read and probably felt intuitively.
Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Katherine Mansfield’s “Miss Brill,” and Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat” are three stories whose respective themes emerge from the authors’ skillful use of plot, character, setting, and symbol.