Theme and Variations

Tackling a Classic of the Curriculum

When it comes to critical reading of great literature, the concept of “theme” is one of the most important things readers need to understand. And yet it can be hard to teach, especially if our students don’t seem to have an inherent grasp of the idea. For starters, theme isn’t typically defined in ways young readers can easily understand. If you look in the dictionary, you’ll find definitions like: “A topic of discourse; A subject of artistic representation; A unifying idea that is a recurrent element in a literary work; etc.” All correct definitions, but try using that language to explain theme to a 9th grader.

As we go through school, we pick up many variations on the basic concept. Some teachers and textbooks combine theme and main idea. Are they the same or different? And if they’re different, how so? Others may speak of themes as being related to symbols and “deeper meaning”. By the time we reach college, some of us figure it out, but many are still confused like I was when I started taking my first classes as an English major. There are no easy answers; it’s a tough concept to work with. But here’s where I like to start out.

Things that happen in a story sometimes have two meanings: a concrete meaning where something that happens is just what it appears to be, and an abstract meaning where that same something is an example of an idea like loneliness, friendship, trust, courage, hope, honor, love, etc. When several different things that happen in a story share the same abstract meaning (different concrete events, same abstract idea), we often say that the author is exploring a theme, especially if the abstract idea deals is something important in life that could apply to many people.

Theme itself is an abstract idea, which is why it can be hard to understand. To make theme more concrete, I’ll ask kids to think it through from an author’s point of view by posing a question like this: “If you were writing a story about a little boy and you wanted to say something about courage, for example, what kinds of scenes would you put into your story?” Immediately, they can come up with all kinds of ideas about little boys doing courageous things.

When we play this little game, it’s easy for kids to come up with many different examples that work. We can play over and over with new themes, new characters, and new situations. We can even choose teams. One team gets to pick the character and the theme, the other team gets to sketch the scene. It’s this kind of interaction, where kids are manipulating plot elements to represent abstract ideas, that helps them develop a solid understanding of theme in the books they read.

An explanation and a game get us started with a basic exploration of the concept, but there are other important things I want kids to learn about themes:

• Story elements represent ideas. It’s not always easy to realize that stories carry both concrete and abstract meaning, and that the author may be choosing specific elements to convey specific messages. Authors may not even be intending to communicate thematically when they make choices in their work. But as our “theme” game shows, readers can interpret almost any event in a story as representing something other than its literal meaning would indicate. That’s the point I want to make: It’s not authors who create themes on the page, it’s readers who create them in their heads.

• Experience evolves in patterns. All human beings are, to some extent, creatures of habit. Because of this, the same things seem to show up in our lives at different points in time. Characters in novels are like this, too. There’s often a thread of similarity that ties together the important events in their lives. Looking at the totality of a character’s experience, we often become aware of patterns: the pattern of embracing one’s true identity in Harry Potter; the pattern of survival in Hatchet; the pattern of societal expectations in The Giver. Seeing these patterns often enough might convince us that while the book is certainly about a certain character, it is also about a certain idea as well.

• Fiction explores important issues. People don’t write fiction just to kill time or to make a living, they write it to talk about important truths in a unique way. Many ideas in human existence are best explored through examples, especially ones where we become emotionally invested. Any writer can write an essay on courage. But only the best fiction writers can craft a story that helps us experience the contradictory sensations of fear and determination that mark most courageous acts. Fiction writers like to discuss ideas just like non-fiction writers do. In one sense, a work of fiction is just a collection of examples that represent ideas a writer wants to talk about.

• Stories apply to many readers. Ideas like envy, loneliness, courage, and greed enter into all of our lives at one time or another. The best stories are those that speak to the most readers in the most powerful way. This is where the notion of “Universal Truths” comes in. Where non-fiction writers often speak to particular truths about the world. Fiction writers are often capable of speaking to thing that are true for all of us.

• Themes are abstract nouns. Themes are nouns, just things really. But they aren’t the kinds of things one can easily survey with the five senses. In other words, they are not concrete. You can’t see loneliness, for example, you can only see examples of it. You can say that J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is about the challenges kids face as they grow up, but the story itself is really just a set of things that happen to the main character. Salinger supplies the concrete examples, we interpret them through an abstract filter.

• Everyone takes a position. Themes don’t exist in stories for their own sake. We’re supposed to think about them, to discern an author’s opinion of them, and to see how that opinion squares with our own. It’s not enough to say that The Catcher in the Rye is about growing up. It’s what The Catcher in the Rye says about growing up, and how readers react to that, that really matters.

• The main idea is the most important position. A story may have several themes. But it can have only one main idea. The main idea is the one most important thing the writer wants the reader to know. It’s the lesson, the moral, the message. If a theme is what a story is about, the main idea is what the author has to say about it. You can think of it as the position an author takes on the most important theme. Of course, the author isn’t taking the position, the reader is just interpreting the story that way. Only in the most simplistic stories do authors contrive specific messages. Readers, however, can’t help but look for a message or moral in their experience.

• Fiction is instructional. As a genre, fiction exists to entertain us, but it also exists to teach us valuable lessons, often the kind that are not easy to learn unless we’re wrapped up in a good yarn. Themes are the subject matter of the lessons fiction writers want us to learn, so Harry Potter can teach us about being ourselves, Hatchet can teach us about survival, The Giver can teach us about conformity, and The Catcher in the Rye can teach us how to have a good time with a free weekend in New York—or how to be more compassionate for kids who grow up awkward, lonely, and scared.

Theme is one of the great traditions of the academy. But writers themselves don’t pay much attention to it. English teachers regard theme as an essential aspect of critical reading. Writers regard it as an affectation which often keeps readers from understanding and appreciating good books. I think kids need to understand both of these ideas.

It’s hard to imagine not wanting to prepare kids for future courses with the standard understanding of theme. At the same time, as someone who has written a bit myself, I wholeheartedly agree with writers who insist that the notion of theme is arbitrary and artificial. The best I think I can do with these opposing views is to represent them  as well as I can and give kids the benefit of both perspectives. When we “discover” a theme in a novel, I validate the discovery as the work that readers do to interpret what they read. At the same time, I caution that there’s no way for us to know if the writer intended for us to discover it, or if the writer even thought about themes at all.

Regardless of where one comes down on the issue of theme, it’s well worth the time and effort to explore it with young readers. Thinking about theme turns on a certain kind of critical reasoning in kids and lets me introduce interesting notions like multiple interpretations of the same text and how the reader’s background influences what they see in a story. Over the years, I’ve started introducing theme to younger groups of readers. What used to be a staple of high school English is now something I’m eager to discuss in 3rd and 4th grade, albeit in a simpler way. Younger students, I find, are more sincere about their study of themes. They still believe in books as instruments of truth and power. As kids get older, and more cynical, theme can seem corny and contrived, so I often turn the tables and ask kids to go at it as writers. Do they believe in theme or not? They can read each other’s stories and find out.

Comments

[Brian Cox]

I learned an important lesson about teaching themes to grade eights my first year of using reader's and writer's workshop. I noticed that the students were reluctant to publicly discuss the abstract concepts in their writing or reading. I wondered if the concetps of themes was over their head, if they were just worried about saying something "uncool", or if they didn't want to risk being wrong in my eyes.

I was shocked when I began to discuss the same topics in their private written conversations. I continue to be amazed at the depths to which my eights will discuss the abstract. After a couple months, we read a novel as a class that I had scanned into Powerpoint. As the students read with me, we talked about themes in the book and in the novels they continued to read on their own. I found the discussions still didn't compare to the one-on-one conversations, but it was a step in the right direction. Bottom line, if we continue to teach theme solely as a whole class approach, especially through forced novel study, we may not truly find out what they can comprehend about the abstract.

[Steve Peha]

I think Brian makes an excellent point here about how personal themes can be. Too often, I know that I forget to keep kids' reading responses as private as I probably should. As Brian notes, kids may indeed share much more about their thinking if they can do it one-on-one.

The one-on-one approach also reminds of how personal each reader's reading of a text can be. And how a reader's personal connection to a story may be the foundation for their thematic interpretation. Reading is just as personal as writing when we get to the topic of reading response. And I think Brian makes a good case here for respecting our readers' privacy.

[Brian Cox]

There are a couple other things I keep in mind when I want quality theme discussion. First is timing. If I ask for a response to a theme, either written or verbal, with a short or immediate time restraint, I should expect to hear some shallow or choppy discussion. I find when I give my students a week to talk to me about what they are reading, the discussion is quite rich. Not only is the discussion on their terms, when they feel ready, but also when there is truly something worth talking about. We all know the feeling for forcing something that isn’t there. We need to keep this in mind when dealing with our students.

I also find second-hand sharing is quite effective too. Even my reluctant sharers are willing show others what they have said or thought after I’ve first validated it. I’m not sure if it is a personal confidence issue or past experience with a pessimistic teacher, but once they know I support them, they are more willing to come forward.