Chapter 7: Study Project on Theme

The themes of a story are the overarching ideas that organize or make sense of the sum of events, characters, and settings of a story.  A story might have a single theme or several.  A story's themes might work together or conflict with one another.  Discerning theme or themes is one task in interpretation.  Another task is determining how themes interrelate with other elements of the story.

1.

Determining Theme 

Determining a story's theme can sometimes be quite easy; other times it requires an analysis of how a story's elements all work together.  To discuss theme, we need a sample text—let us use Alice Walker's "Everyday Use." The following are questions you might pose to help define this (or any) story's theme:

1. What happens in the plot? Do the events of the story produce any sense of right and wrong, of one state of affairs as preferable to another?
2. Are some characters described more favorably than others?  What are their roles in the plot's events?
3. How do we understand the narrator's attitude toward events?
4. What might the story's title tell us about what is important in a story?
5. With whom do we sympathize and why?
6. What would you tell someone about what a story is "saying"?  In other words, what is your "gut" reaction?

Sometimes only asking one question will enable you to discern a theme.  In the case of "Everyday Use," for example, detailing plot might reveal that the narrator/mother's refusal to give the visiting Wangero the heirloom quilt indicates her preference for old-fashioned values—that family and tradition are more important than pretense.  We might continue the analysis, seeing how the narrator describes Wangero rather snidely and Maggie sympathetically, that the narrator disapproves of Wangero's name change, her attitude, and her snobbish sophistication.  The story's title "Everyday Use" tells us that culture and tradition are to be lived rather than displayed.  For these reasons we tend to sympathize with Maggie and the narrator.

It would be equally possible to come to a sense of this story's theme by posing any one of the questions.  If, however, you begin with your "gut" reaction, you will need to back it up with answers to some of the other questions.

2.

Theme and Story Art

As you could see above, explorations of theme involve explorations of the other basic elements of fiction.  Themes generally organize or make sense of these elements as they work together.  If a story has more than one theme, sometimes each theme will organize story elements differently.  For example, "Everyday Use" might have another theme about the pretensions of youth.  If we look at the story's events, what we might also see is that the narrator/mother disapproves of Wangero's newly found attitudes toward her heritage and that she sees her enthusiasms as wrong-headed and silly ways to try to make herself "better" than her roots.  Other elements of the story—the narrator's descriptions of Wangero, her tone, and her refusal to give in to Wangero's requests—suggest a theme of age and experience versus the enthusiasms of youth.  This second theme does not interfere with the first, but it does emphasize slightly different elements of the story, particularly the narrator's tone and actions.

If you were going to consider this text in terms of issues of race, you would be enacting a race criticism.  You might ask how this text reflects the experience of black Americans, or the ways in which it thematizes problems in black culture in America such as the loss of tradition and the movement toward the city.  If you were a Marxist critic you might ask how this story reflects problems of class and racial oppression, or how the story itself, as it appears in a textbook, participates in the broader ideology of American culture.