Analyzing Setting
What is the work's setting in space and time?
How does the author go about establishing setting? Does the author want the reader to see or feel the setting; or does the author want the reader both to see and feel it? What details of the setting does the author isolate and describe?
Is the setting important? If so, what is its function? Is it used to reveal, reinforce, or influence character, plot, or theme?
Is the setting an appropriate one?
THEME
Theme - means different things to different people.
moral or lesson (e.g.: Aesop's fables or Parson Weems' famous story about George Washington and the cherry tree)
basic issue, problem or subject: "the nature of man", "the discovery of truth", or "the brotherhood of man" (Sherwood Anderson's I Want To Know Why, James Joyce's Araby, Katherine Anne Porter's The Grave, and John Updike's A&P - the theme of initiation, the rite of passage into the world of adulthood)
familiar pattern or motif (John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Nathaniel Hawthorne's My Kinsman, Major Molineux, and Flannery O'Connor's The Artificial Nigger - the journey theme)
In literature, the theme = the central idea or statement about life that unifies and controls the total work => it is not the issue, or problem, or subject with which the work deals (as violence is the subject of Stephen Crane's The Blue Hotel), but is the comment or statement the author makes about that subject as it necessarily and inevitably emerges from the interplay of the various elements of the work.
significance of the theme = one of the marks of a great work of literature ("classic")
Author's ability to construct a work with various elements working together to produce a significant theme is an important test of the quality of that author's mind and art.
Any discussion of the theme must take other elements of fiction into account.
Theme does not exist as an intellectual abstraction
Theme is related to the work's total structure and texture.
3 important points about themes in fiction:
theme may be less prominent and less fully developed in some works of fiction than in others (detective, gothic, adventure fiction - may not have a demonstrable theme; humor and satire – may have significant theme).
different people – different themes (the arrangements of the elements of the work → mutually exclusive statements).
the theme ≠ the reader's particular beliefs and values.
Identifying Theme
To identify the theme = attempting to formulate in our own words the statement about life or human experience that is made by the total work ← analysis of a number of elements in their relation to one another and to the work as a whole.
To identify theme
- to bring together and to understand the various aspects of the work; to be open-minded and objective and not to pay attention to some elements of the work, or not to read into them what simply is not there
- to validate our understanding,
- to focus our response, and
- to make the work finally and fully our own.
Ideas in theme:
- commonplace (within the framework of our own experience)
- complex and abstract (hard to understand and put into words)
Themes:
- topical (involve ideas that are valid only in relation to a specific time and place, or to a specific set of circumstances);
- universal
- explicitly stated by one of the characters (who serves as a spokesman for the author) or by the author in the guise of an omniscient narrator.
- not stated but implied (gradually revealed through the treatment of character and incident and by the development of the story).
Different kinds of works will yield different themes in different ways.
There is no one correct approach to identifying theme.
Helpful suggestions and comments:
1. Theme ≠ the work's subject or situation.
Theme is the abstract, generalized statement or comment that the work makes about a concrete subject or situation.
Begin with the subject or situation; once that is identified, formulate a thematic statement about the work.
2. Statement of theme must do the work full justice.
Avoid understanding the theme by failing to discover its total significance.
Avoid overstating and enlarging it beyond what the elements of the story can be shown to support.
There are very few generalizations about experience that will hold true under every circumstance.
Most of the really important questions about human existence do not yield easy, formalistic answers.
Do not to credit literary works with solutions and answers where such issues and questions are only being explored or where only tentative answers are being proposed.
Avoid not seeing the full thematic significance of a work.
Theme = statement about life that unifies and controls the total work => whether it is fully and completely supported by the work's other elements.
Wrong statement of the theme → certain elements or details unexplained, or those elements and details fail to confirm our statement.
Some title = protagonist or essential character (The Darling, A Hunger Artist, A Rose for Emily, King of the Bingo Game).
Some titles = clues about theme.
E.g.: Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" refers not only to the uncharted center of Africa, the "dark" continent, but to the capacity for evil or corruption that exists in the human heart, a title relevant to both the plot situation and the theme of Conrad's story.
Some titles can be as deceptive or misleading.
E.g.: The title of Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations, for examples, is clearly ironic, for Pip can reach maturity only after he renounces his "great expectations" and the false assumptions and values upon which they are based.
Biographies, autobiographies, author’s personal statements ← about the author, the times in which he lived and wrote, and the relationship between the author and the work; tell about the author's intentions.
But sometimes authors are as fallible as the rest of us in explaining motive, and in some cases may be the least reliable of guides as to what their work finally means.
"Never trust the artist. Trust the tale." (D.H. Lawrence Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)