Themes
A theme is not a word. It is a sentence — a claim about life that the text makes, and that you can argue about.
Topic and theme are not the same thing
Poverty is a topic. Love is a topic. War is a topic. None of them can be agreed or disagreed with, and none of them can be argued for.
A theme is what the text says about the topic. Turn the word into a sentence and you have a theme you can write an essay about.
From topic to theme
| Topic (weak) | Theme (strong) |
|---|---|
| Poverty | The novel shows how poverty narrows the choices of people who are otherwise capable. |
| Love | The play suggests that love which demands obedience is not love at all. |
| War | The poem presents war not as heroism but as a bureaucracy that consumes ordinary people. |
| Family | The story argues that families can protect and imprison a person with the same actions. |
| Tradition | The text suggests that tradition survives because it gives people a role, even when the role costs them. |
| Ambition | The play shows ambition destroying first the thing it wanted and then the person who wanted it. |
How to find a theme in a text
Ask what the text keeps returning to
A theme is not mentioned once. Look for what appears in several different places: a repeated image, a repeated situation, a question asked more than once.
Look at what characters want and cannot have
Themes usually live in the gap between desire and possibility. What does each main character want? What stops them? The answer to the second question is often the theme.
Look at the ending
What the writer chooses to reward, punish or leave unresolved tells you what the text believes. An ending that refuses to resolve is itself a statement.
Write it as a full sentence
Begin The writer suggests that… and finish the sentence. If you cannot finish it, you have a topic, not a theme.
Find three moments that support it
Early, middle and late in the text. Three moments across the whole text let you show development, which is what higher marks reward.
Writing a theme answer
A theme essay goes wrong in a predictable way: the student names the theme, then retells the parts of the story where it appears. The result is a summary with a label on top.
Build it instead as an argument that develops. Each paragraph should show the theme at a different stage of the text and say what has changed.
- Introduction: state the theme as a sentence, and say how the text develops it.
- Paragraph 1: the theme as it first appears — early in the text, usually in a simple form.
- Paragraph 2: the theme complicated — a moment where it is questioned, or where a character resists it.
- Paragraph 3: the theme at the end — what the text finally suggests, and whether it resolves the question.
- Conclusion: what the writer wants the reader to take away, and whether the text argues it or merely presents it.
A useful discipline
For each prescribed text, write your themes on one page as complete sentences beginning The writer suggests that…, with three moments listed under each.
That single page will serve almost every theme question you can be asked on that text, and it takes an hour to make.