Writing about Fiction

Writing an essay interpreting a work of literature means that we must probe our initial responses to the work, examining the work closely to find the basis for our thinking.  This analysis of the work and of our reactions to it helps us to discover and create new meaning.  But we do not write for ourselves alone; we also write for others.  We present our interpretations as arguments.  We make a claim about a story, novel, or play just as we would about an issue or problem.  As with all argumentative writing, we must provide reasons and evidence to convince readers that our interpretation is plausible.  Since literary works can be interpreted in different ways, we do not seek to prove that we have discovered the one correct or final meaning.  Instead, we try to convince our readers that we have analyzed the work carefully and thoughtfully and have found a reasonable way of understanding it.

Approaching the Story or Novel:

You need an approach that will lead to ideas.  Your goal is to write an essay interpreting the story or novel you have read.  These steps provide a starting point:

• Read the story or novel for pleasure, diversion, and insight.
• Approach: Look over the list of approaches that follows to find one that interests you.  Any approach will enable you to begin serious analysis of a story or novel to discover what it might mean.  Try several approaches.
• Annotate: Reread the story or novel with pencil in hand, annotating anything you notice that is at all relevant to the approach you are taking.  To annotate, mark on the text itself and write in the margins, or keep a list of relevant pages and passages.  Do this several times.
• Inventory: Look over your annotations and inventory them.  Organize them into patterns.
• Write: Analyze your inventory and write at least a page about the patterns you have discovered.  What does this reveal?
• Assert: Reflect on what you have learned through this approach.  In a sentence or two, assert one or more ideas you now have about the story or novel.

A Catalog of Approaches:

• Surprising or Puzzling Statements: Select a surprising or puzzling statement that especially interests you.  Then reread, annotating to explore the significance of the statement as it appears throughout the novel.
• Patterns: To find patterns of related words, images, actions, or scenes, reread, watching for words or passages that suggest particular feelings, moods, or meanings.  Reread and annotate.
• Character or Character Change: Examine the personality and state of mind of one of the characters.  Annotate the story or novel, noting the character's name, speech, actions, thoughts, motives and goals, relations with other characters, contradictions in thoughts, development, etc.
• Narration/Point of View: Analyze how the story is told, who tells it, how much the narrator knows, and how trustworthy the narrator is.
• Ironies or Contradictions: Identify ironies or contradictions in events and what characters think, say, or do.  Annotate the novel with one or more ironies or contradictions in mind.
• Literary Motifs: Analyze the novel as an example of a conventional literary motif, such as the conflict between the individual and society, coming of age or initiation, a journey or quest, the disparity between appearance and reality, and the double, in which two or more characters represent alternative realities.
• Setting: Consider the physical setting of the story or novel: place and time of the events, whether the setting or scene changes, the way the writer presents the setting, whether the setting reflects the characters' actions, moods, etc.
• Structure: Analyze the novel in terms of its arrangement: opening, foreshadowing, points of tension, climax, the ending.
• Historical, Social, and Economic Contexts: Analyze the novel for specific historical, political, economic, social, or religious references.
• Author's Biographical Context: Analyze the novel for specific references that may have parallels in the author's life.

Finding a Thesis:

Your aim is to find a thesis you will be able to develop and support with specific evidence from the story or novel.  You may already have a tentative thesis in mind, but it is still advisable to consider several other possibilities.

• Listing generalizations: Begin by reviewing all the assertions or generalizations that you wrote as you completed each approach to the novel.  Start a list of the most promising ones.
• Choosing a possible thesis: From your list, choose one to refine into a thesis for your essay.
• Writing and revising a tentative thesis statement: You now want to turn your generalization into a thesis statement.  A good thesis should offer an interesting idea about the story or novel, be concise and well focused, preclude easy challenge, and include the key terms that you will use in your discussion of the story or novel.  Consider your thesis tentative at this stage.  Once you begin collecting and organizing evidence to support your thesis, you may decide the evidence supports it only partially or even contradicts it.  Be prepared to revise the thesis to fit your new understanding of the story or novel.
• Consider your readers: Two things are essential to know about your readers: whether they are familiar with the novel, and whether they are likely to favor other interpretations.  Knowing these things will help you phrase your thesis, choose your evidence, construct your argument, and write your paper.

Gathering Textual Evidence:

Having settled on a tentative thesis and identified your readers, you now need to find evidence to support your thesis.  As you draft and revise, you will constantly be returning to the story or novel for evidence.  But first you need to find evidence.

• Identifying evidence.  With your thesis in mind, search for evidence that will support it.  Note everything you can find that seems relevant to your thesis--dialogue, events, descriptive details, key words, images.  Annotate this evidence.  You may also find evidence that contradicts your thesis.  Do not ignore this evidence.  Let it lead you to clarify and revise your thesis.
• Organizing evidence.  Your goal is to begin by grouping evidence around probable ideas.  One way is to list the ideas, give each a number, and then review the evidence you have identified, coding each piece of evidence for the idea it seems to support.
• Evaluating evidence.  Determine whether you have sufficient evidence to support your thesis and develop a convincing argument.
• Researching other critics' interpretations.  After you have examined the story or novel closely and have developed a thesis, your instructor may encourage or require you to search out other interpretations to help you clarify and develop your ideas.  Reading what others have written is like entering a conversation about the story or novel.  You may agree or disagree, find your own ideas supported or challenged, discover new insights, or learn nothing at all.  If you do the research, be sure to cite any ideas from other critics that you use in your essay.  Whether you quote, paraphrase, or summarize others' ideas, keep the focus on your own argument.  Do not write a report surveying what others think; write an essay arguing for your own interpretation.  Let the sources work for you.  If you read published interpretations, keep careful notes of your research, noting direct quotations you may use later.  Keep a record of your sources, including page numbers.

Source: Dr. Mary Susan Johnston, English Department, Minnesota State University - Mankato (1989)