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Analyzing Point of View
What is the point of view? Who talks to the reader? Is the point of view consistent throughout the work or does it shift in some way?
Where does the narrator stand in relation to the work? Where does the reader stand?
To what source of knowledge or information does the point of view give the reader access? What sources of knowledge or information does it serve to conceal?
If the work is told from the point of view of one of the characters, is the narrator reliable? Does his\ her personality, character or intellect affect an ability to interpret the events or the other characters correctly?
Given the author’s purposes, is the chosen point of view an appropriate and effective one?
How would the work be different if told from another point of view?
THEME
Theme is one of those critical terms that mean very different things to different people. To some, who think of literature mainly as a vehicle for teaching, preaching, propaganding a favorite idea, or encouraging some form of correct conduct, theme may mean the moral or lesson that can be extracted from the work, as with one of Aesop’s fables or Parson Weems’ famous (and, sadly, apocryphal) story about George Washington and the cherry tree. Theme is also used sometimes to refer to the basic issue, problem or subject with which the work is concerned: for example, “the nature of man”, “the discovery of truth”, or “the brotherhood of man”. In this sense, a number of stories included in this anthology – Sherwood Anderson’s I want to know why, James Joyce’s Araby, Katherine Anne Porter’s The Grave, and John Updike’s A&P may also be said to deal in common with the theme of initiation, the rite of passage into the world of adulthood. Or, we may speak of theme as a familiar pattern or motif that occurs again and again in literature, say the journey theme found in works as different and similar as John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s My Kinsman, Major Molineux, and Flannery O’Connor’s The Artificial Nigger.
When we speak of theme in connection with critical analysis of a literary work, however, we usually have a broader and more inclusive definition in mind. In literature, the theme is the central idea or statement about life that unifies and controls the total work. By this definition, then, the theme is not the issue, or problem, or subject with which the work deals, as violence is the subject of Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel”. Rather, the theme is the comment or statement the author makes about that subject as it necessarily and inevitably emerges from the interplay of the various elements of the work.
Theme in literature, whether it takes the form of a brief and meaningful insight or a comprehensive vision of life, is the author’s way of communicating and sharing ideas, perceptions, and feelings with his reader or, as is so often the case, of probing and exploring with them the puzzling questions of human existence, most of which do not yield neat, tidy, and universal acceptable answers. Although we cannot, as critics, judge a work solely on the basis of the quality (of the ideas presented for on their degree of complexity or sophistication), it’s nevertheless true that one of the marks of a great work of literature – a work that we generally regard as a “classic” – is the significance of its theme; an author’s ability to construct a work whose various elements work together to yield a significant theme is an important test of the quality of that author’s mind and art.
“What does it mean?” “What is the author trying to say?” “What is the theme of the work?” These are questions that students are often most eager and impatient to discuss. Why, then, one may properly ask, did we not begin our discussion of fiction by discussing theme? Why delay its introduction until after having considered plot, character, setting, and point of view?
We have done so for a reason that has a great deal to do not only with the nature of theme, but with the nature of fiction itself. We have organized our discussion to illustrate the fact that a work of fiction consists of a number of crucial elements in addition to theme; that the identification and understanding of these other elements – particularly the interaction of character and incident – can be as important to the story as theme, or more so; and that any discussion of the theme must be prepared to take those other elements into account. Theme does not exist as an intellectual abstraction that an author superimposes on the work like icing on a cake although, at times, there is a temptation to treat it as such; the theme is organically and necessarily related to the work’s total structure and texture. This is the point made by Flannery O’Connor, one of America’s most important twentieth-century writers of fiction, using one of her typical homely metaphor:
People talk about the theme of a story as if the theme were like a string that a sack of chicken feed is tied with. They think that if you can pick out the theme, the way you pick the right thread in the chicken-feed sack, you can rip the story open and feed the chickens. But this is not the way meaning works in fiction… The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.
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