Using NewView to Find Theme in Novels
When you’re writing a lit analysis essay on a novel, you’ll want to be sure to get the theme right because everything else in the story should relate to the theme. Oh–you’d like a good definition of theme?
The theme of a story is what the author is trying to communicate to readers, the main idea. In a well-written novel, the theme is worked in all throughout the story, and the foils, conflicts and resolutions, and other literary devices—as well as the characters’ actions, interactions, and motivations—are usually all supporting the theme.
However, since novels are often long stories hundreds of pages long, all the details that make a story real to readers may get in the way. Some writers even try to make a novel into a sort of puzzle so that readers have to work a bit to figure out the theme. Others put great effort into making their main idea quite plain and quite visible to readers.
Still, regardless of how an author writes his novel, the theme will always be closely related to the OldView – NewView relationship in the story.
How can it be otherwise? The change from the OldView in the beginning to the NewView Reverse at the end is absolutely fundamental to every story—because without a change at the end, there’s no story, right?
And that change at the end is always a NewView Reverse, as we have seen in both short stories as well as novels.
Furthermore, a theme expresses a general insight about people, either as types of individuals, or as a society, or as mankind as a whole. And that general insight should be seen throughout the major incidents and even in most of the smaller parts of the story. So if a stated theme doesn’t relate to all the major incidents and to most of the minor incidents, then that isn’t the true theme of the story. A true theme will be supported by just about everything in a well-written story. If it isn’t, then it just can’t possibly be the real theme.
Tomorrow, I’ll conclude this discussion by showing how to connect the NewView Reverse at the end of Harper Lee’s outstanding novel, “To Kill A Mockingbird,” with the theme for the whole book. You’ll really want to come back here tomorrow to read what I have to say. Why? Because “To Kill A Mockingbird” is the most NON- analyzed famous book in literature. Out of 30 million copies in print throughout the world, in 40 different languages, there are only about 30 published analyses of it, and no doctoral theses have been written on it. Once again—why? Because the novel is so rich in detail that it has defied analysis—until now. NewView lights the way. Check in tomorrow and see if I get it right, okay?
