A Brief Introduction To Theme

Theme can be hard to pin down. It's what a story or poem or play is about, but not in the sense of “he does this and she did that.” Rarely will a character or narrator boldly announce the themes of their texts, but finding the theme is the first step in interpretation.

Most stories try to make the events and people they describe appear as realistic as possible. For example, Yann Martel and Daniel Defoe went to great lengths to make their novels Life of Pi and Robinson Crusoe seem real as they plunged their protagonists into tales of shipwrecks and survival. These novels were published centuries apart, but both of them have characters whose lives are suddenly and drastically changed by a shipwreck. It doesn't matter one had an island with benign flora and fauna and the other was stranded on a raft to fend for and defend himself: they had to survive for a long time with what little they had.

Survival is an abstract concept. Any narrative where the characters are placed in a situation where the main concern is find food and shelter or die, it's safe to say it’s a tale of survival. Because survival is an abstract concept and because it appears in other narratives, like Lord of the Flies or Hatchet, we can call it a theme. However, it’s not going to be the only theme in these narratives. Just as a theme will appear in multiple narratives, multiple elements in a narrative will complicate and contribute to the themes of the narrative. If each of these were only about a single theme, they’d be the same story telling the same events the same way.

Theme develops through the repetition of narrative elements that complicate and advance the narrative.

Robinson Crusoe is not just about survival, but also colonization, ingenuity, and the middle class. The novel starts with his father admonishing him not to go to sea but to live a comfortable middle class life, and much of Crusoe’s narrative is about how he maintains and improves his conditions on the island. Crusoe doesn't just survive: he thrives. He catalogs his wares, his crop yields, his animals, and his activities, and even projects what he needs to do to maintain a comfortable existence as he becomes master of his domain. Every material aspect is accounted for. He rises from a poor situation to a higher one, advancing from being at the whim of nature (the shipwreck) to commanding it as he shapes his island.

Life of Pi isn't quite so positive. Pi has to struggle to survive, and rather than gradually improving, Pi’s condition gradually worsens. He has no trees to harvest nor seeds to plant – let alone ground to plant them in – and Richard Parker perpetually threatens his life. Pi catalogs what he has not to measure his wealth, but because once it's gone, it’s gone. Pi certainly has to be ingenious to survive, but the themes of the middle class and colonization are absent. If anything, loss factors much more into Life of Pi: he loses his family, his home, and his animals, in a single event and is left with a few bare supplies, Richard Parker, and his faith. Pi Patel survives but he does not thrive.

Theme is about identifying major issues and concepts that appear and reappear within and across stories. It involves associating not just the entire narrative with a single abstraction, but how the narrative repeats similar topics and issues, how these repetitions can cue us to broader concepts, and how these concepts reappear in other stories.