Theme What’s it all about?

Theme in fiction is a generalization about life, the human experience, or human nature. It is sometimes stated, but more often implied by the story.

It is NOT the “moral” of the story, nor is it the “hidden meaning” or “lesson” to be learned. It is about universal truths

So, how do you state the theme of a story? Theme must be a statement about the subject and it must be in sentence form No: The heroism and self-sacrifice of soldiers Yes: Loyalty to country often inspires heroic self-sacrifice.

The theme should be stated as a generalization about life. Yet, we must be careful not to make the generalization larger than is justified by the terms of the story Avoid terms like every, all, always; use instead qualifying terms like some, sometimes, may

Theme is the central and unifying concept of a story Therefore:  It accounts for all the major details of the story  The theme is not contradicted by any detail of the story  The theme cannot rely upon supposed facts – facts not actually stated or clearly implied by the story. The theme exists inside not outside the story. The statement of it must be based on the data of the story itself, not on assumptions supplied from our own experience

There is no one way of stating the theme of a story It merely presents a view of life, and as long as the conditions are supported by the events of the story, that view may be stated in more than one way

We should avoid any statement that reduces the theme to clichés we have heard all our lives, such as “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” Although such a statement may express the theme accurately, too often it is simply a lazy shortcut that impoverishes the essential meaning of the story in order to save mental effort A theme is not trite, it must say something insightful about the human experience