Theme – of a piece of fiction is its controlling idea or its central insight. It is the unifying generalization about life stated or implied by the story. To derive the theme of the story, we must determine what its central purpose is: What view of life it supports or what insight into life it reveals?
Theme Exists Only When:
An author has seriously attempted to record life accurately or to reveal some truth about it
An author has deliberately introduced as an unifying element some concept or theory of life that the story illuminates
The theme is not simply the moral or the lesson, and when a person tries to draw the theme from this perspective they generally oversimplify the theme.
Don’t askWhat does the story teach?AskWhat does the story reveal?
How to determine the theme?
1) Theme should be expressible in the form of a statement with a subject and a predicate.
2) The theme should be states as a generalization about life. In stating theme we do not use the name of characters or refer to precise places or events.
3) We must be careful not to make the generalization larger than is justified by the terms of the story.
4) Theme is the central and unifying concept of a story. Therefore:
a) It accounts for all the major details of the story.
b) The theme is not contradicted by any detail of the story.
c) The theme cannot rely upon supposed facts, facts not actually stated or clearly implied by the story.
5) There is no one way of stating the theme of a story.
6) We should avoid any statement that reduces the theme to some familiar saying that we have heard all our lives, such as “You can’t judge a book by its cover” or “A stitch in times saves nine.”
This is a note that should have been given under fiction, but I put it on King Lear section so you will read it*
Theme – of a piece of fiction is its controlling idea or its central insight. It is the unifying generalization about life stated or implied by the story. To derive the theme of the story, we must determine what its central purpose is: What view of life it supports or what insight into life it reveals?
How to determine the theme?
1) Theme should be expressible in the form of a statement with a subject and a predicate.
2) The theme should be states as a generalization about life. In stating theme we do not use the name of characters or refer to precise places or events.
3) We must be careful not to make the generalization larger than is justified by the terms of the story.
4) Theme is the central and unifying concept of a story. Therefore:
a) It accounts for all the major details of the story.
b) The theme is not contradicted by any detail of the story.
c) The theme cannot rely upon supposed facts, facts not actually stated or clearly implied by the story.
5) There is no one way of stating the theme of a story.
6) We should avoid any statement that reduces the theme to some familiar saying that we have heard all our lives, such as “You can’t judge a book by its cover” or “A stitch in times saves nine.”