Theme as Thesis
When I was young and stupid and frivolous, I thought following a form was the most limiting thing you could do as a writer. I liked pushing boundaries, discovering new horizons, creating something truly new and unique. And even though I had a way with words, I had difficulty turning in a well-composed essay. Don’t get me wrong now. My papers were never awful, but invariably, I would get it back with comments critiquing the organization and the buried argument. Of course, it wasn’t until I started teaching that I really learned how to fix those problems. I did, of course, get better over time, but teaching really put things in perspective for me and I was able to find a common thread between the academic essay and storytelling.
The academic essay is probably one of the easiest forms to understand but one of the hardest to master. It’s simplicity is its greatest strength, and the part that trips up most budding writers. It’s essentially three parts: an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. The introduction presents the topic and what others have said about the subject, which leads logically to your thesis, the heart of your paper, the main argument which you intend to prove. The body offers evidence and interpretation of that evidence which supports the paper’s thesis. The conclusion provides an interpretation of the argument you’ve presented and explains its significance to your field/subject/audience. And the short story or novel or poem can follow those same rules.
A story’s theme is its thesis, the answer to question that drives the writer to keep writing to the end, to discover what possibilities exist. A great story aims to prove something the same way an academic essay does. And typically, if the writer is any good, he or she plants those seeds in the very first paragraph–if not lines.
Let’s look at Joyce’s “Araby” as an example. The story itself is a simple one: Boy meets girl, falls in love, learns she wants to go to the festival but can’t, decides to buy her a present, but ends up leaving empty handed. This is not what I would call exciting. I’ve done that on a weekend (and for most of my adolesent life). So what? But that’s the thing: It’s not just the events that are important, but how they are told and experienced by the narrator which determines the genius of the story. The work dwells heavily on the theme of love vs. lust and learning the difference in the soul-crushing wasteland of Irish-Catholic Dublin.
The story begins:
North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.
The first paragraph alone sets up the narrator’s problem. His street in Dublin is “blind.” And even though he’s saying that it’s a dead end, that diction choice parallels the final image of the story as the boy stumbles in the darkness and his eyes burn with anguish. Joyce is implictly showing us the problem of the story, using his theme and symbol to do so. The street is a stand in for our narrator. He too finds a dead end in his “love” for Madgen’s sister, but also, the choice of blind alludes to his own blindness, his inability to differentiate between love and lust. And notice the end of the first sentence, the reversal that occurs. The only time the street is happy is when the school “sets the boys free.” Again, this is no mistake on the part of the author. Joyce is saying that casting off the fetters of religion is the only way to achieve happiness and enlightenment. Lust is OK–as long as you’re OK with it too. It’s a human emotion that we all feel. Why should we surpress it? Why should we be embarassed by it? Why should we bow down to the mores of the Church?
Of course, the next paragraph elaborates on that idea further, with a description of the narrator’s house, and it is this theme the story keeps coming back to.
Later on, Joyce writes:
One evening I went into the back drawing-room in which the priest had died. It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house…. All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring:
–O love! O love! many times.
This is the thesis of the story, the theme, the part where the author most obviously addresses the question. Here we have the conflict of religion and instinct, of love and lust. The boy is praying, but the diction choices betray his innocence. It doesn’t sound like a typical prayer but, instead, more like masturbation or Onanism, which is forbidden. But the boy cries out in “love” because he doesn’t know what to do with those feelings. He doesn’t know what that twitching in his pants means, and he mistakes them for love. And his dialogue with Madgen’s sister only furthers that point:
She asked me was I going to Araby. I forgot whether I answered yes or no. It would be a splendid bazaar, she said; she would love to go.
–And why can’t you? I asked.
While she spoke she turned a silver bracelet round and round her wrist. She could not go, she said, because there would be a retreat that week in her convent. Her brother and two other boys were fighting for their caps and I was alone at the railings. She held one of the spikes, bowing her head towards me. The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing. It fell over one side of her dress and caught the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease.
–It’s well for you, she said.
–If I go, I said, I will bring you something.
This exchange highlights her absolute lack of interest in the narrator, and his failure to recognize it. Here is a girl who’s just being nice, talking to this slightly younger, immature boy, and when he says he will go, she says, “It’s well for you.” That might be one of the most backhanded things she could have said. She really doesn’t care if he goes. She’s only humoring him with the conversation. But the narrator is too blinded by “love” to notice.
It’s only in the darkness of the bazaar, when the narrator witnesses the bawdy talk of a young English woman and some boys (not at all Arabian or exotic as he was led to believe) that he has his ephipany:
At the door of the stall a young lady was talking and laughing with two young gentlemen. I remarked their English accents and listened vaguely to their conversation.
–O, I never said such a thing!
–O, but you did!
–O, but I didn’t!
–Didn’t she say that?
–Yes. I heard her.
–O, there’s a… fib!
Observing me the young lady came over and asked me did I wish to buy anything. The tone of her voice was not encouraging; she seemed to have spoken to me out of a sense of duty. I looked humbly at the great jars that stood like eastern guards at either side of the dark entrance to the stall and murmured:
–No, thank you.
The young lady changed the position of one of the vases and went back to the two young men. They began to talk of the same subject. Once or twice the young lady glanced at me over her shoulder.
This is the moment when things become clear for him. We aren’t privvy to the entire conversation, but we can assume by her denial that it’s something “bad,” something which she feels the need to deny three times (and look over her shoulder at the boy). (It was improper to write about sex in the early 1900s, after all.) The narrator is coming to grips with his own blindness, learning that the emotion he feels is not love: He wants Madgen’s sister sexually, not romantically. He now sees himself “as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and [his] eyes burned with anguish and anger,” which completes the cycle.
We begin with an introduction of the subject (religion and instinct/love and lust), then we get our thesis (confusing one for the other), then our body (the boy’s story goal, his journey to the bazaar, and not buying a present), and finally our conclusion (recognizing the difference, the “so what?” moment of the story).
Every great story should aim to let its theme inform it the same way. It must the infect the work entirely. It may not lead to an ephiphany like Joyce’s work, but regardless of its techinque, it still follows the story form and addresses its story question. It must be there from the start and seen through to the end. Bad or unsuccessful stories make the mistake of ignoring theme or misusing it or undermining what they are trying to say, but great stories dwell on it, return it time and time again. Without it, all you have is a series of events that aren’t worth reading in the first place.