Post 7: Theme

“We want texts to mean something.” And I think this is why we, as readers, go through “an insistent search for theme.” But sometimes when we believe there is always a theme to be searched for we lose sight of the qualities that make the story what it is, like chapter 3 of The Literary Experience stated.

In Charles Perrault’s story, Little Red Riding Hood, it seems easy to pick out the theme or moral of this story because it deals with an issue that we’re familiar with. And maybe this is the reason why we should not always look for themes in stories: we begin to generalize the meaning behind the story based on our own experiences.

But sometimes the meaning behind a story is not as simple as Little Red Riding Hood. Stories are not always as easily written and understandable as Little Red Riding Hood. Sometimes the ending is unpredictable like when the girl “took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead” in James Thurber’s The Girl and the Wolf. However, sometimes it’s not necessarily the content or words of the story that build meaning behind it. It is the qualities and the techniques of the writing that help build something purposeful from the story such as in a poem.

One of my favorite passages from chapter 3 of The Literary Experience was this: “Literary works and films may well ask us to step into unfamiliar territory and see things in context of the artist’s vision. To some extent, this involves a willing surrender. We approach works of art receptive to the notion that they may offer us something new, that they may widen our experience or deepen our powers of sympathy and empathy.” We must learn to surrender what is already familiar to us in order to experience something new and unexplored.