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**Note: there are spoilers to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in this post.
For me, theme is a theory which the writer has about human relations with each other, their environment, or internally with themselves, and the writer tries to convince the reader of the validity of the theory/theme in scenes which demonstrate it through the actions and interactions of the characters. The theme should not be obviously stated, with the reader feeling they participated in the process by discovering it themselves. When I read, I am always searching for the theme, and I try to define it in a sentence or two, as I believe this will help me in developing themes for my own novels.
Theories are proved from observed repeating patterns, and this is no different for the theme/theory of a novel. There is another repeating pattern I have noticed in the novels which I have done this exercise with, which is the protagonist’s character flaw, and that is often linked to the repeating pattern of the theme.
Let’s look at how this works in a novel with one of the strongest themes I have ever read, John Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’.
For me, the main theme in a sentence is: The richer people become, the more they fight to protect their wealth from the poor, using violence if necessary; but the poorer people become, the more they are willing to help their fellow poor. The writer must convince the reader of this through scenes:
The richer people become, the more they fight to protect their wealth from the poor, using violence if necessary.
- We meet the main protagonist, Tom Joad, returning home from a prison sentence for killing a man, and we learn he has a propensity for violence, his character flaw. As the Joad family travel from the Oklahoma dustbowl to California to find work, they will come across landowners who are increasingly violent towards them, fighting to protect their wealth, and Tom will struggle to keep his flaw in check.
- The former preacher, Jim Casy, with whom the family are travelling, attempts to set up unions on the farms on which they work on the way to California, to the annoyance of the landowners, who employ violent tactics to stop the workers unionising and demanding more money.
- When his friend Jim Casy is killed by a policeman, protecting the landowners’ property and profits, Tom is no longer able to keep his character flaw in check, and he in turn kills a policeman.
The poorer people become, the more they are willing to help their fellow poor.
- The Joad family have few resources when they set out on the journey to California, but they invite Jim Casy, who has even less, to accompany them.
- They meet a couple, the Wilsons, also heading for California, and both families assist each other in making the journey. When one of the Joad clan dies, the Wilsons lend them their precious quilt to wrap the body in. In turn, the Joads help to fix the Wilsons’ vehicle so that they can continue the journey.
- The Joads share food with other families on the journey even though they don’t have much themselves.
- The novel ends with the highest demonstration of this element of the theme. The Joads’ daughter Rose of Sharon’s husband has run off, and her first child is stillborn. At this point, she is as poor as any woman can become (I can hear many women saying good riddance to the runaway husband, but let’s remember that the novel is set in the 1930’s, and at that time a woman in her condition without a husband would have been considered poorer). The family are also split up due to unforeseen circumstances, and as Rose of Sharon and her mother walk down a rain sodden road, they come across a distraught boy whose father is dying of starvation in a barn. They have no food to offer him, but Rose of Sharon carries in her breasts the milk for her stillborn child… and I think you can guess the rest.
So theme in essence is a recurring pattern in the story which says something about the human condition.
How do you recommend illustrating the theme of your book?
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View Comments (8)
It helps if you can state the theme in a single, fairly concise way at some point in the book. The title is often a way into the theme. My third novel is entitled The More Things Change and I imagine most readers will realise that the rest of the quote is, “…the more they stay the same,” but if they don’t I preface the novel with three quotes:
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Alphonse Karr
(The more things change, the more they are the same.)
Se desideriamo le cose rimanere lo stesso, le cose dovranno cambiare.
Tancred, in Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa's The Leopard
(If we want things to stay the same, things will have to change.)
VLADIMIR: Le fond ne change pas.
ESTRAGON: Rien à faire.
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Act I
VLADIMIR: The essential doesn’t change.
ESTRAGON: Nothing to be done.
The whole point to the novel is to show how people don’t change. A man basically gets to live his dream and then runs his dream into the ground. He starts the book alone in a park and ends alone in a park. Everything he goes through cancels itself out.
I can’t do that with Milligan and Murphy though; the title doesn’t really help but it is the right title for other reasons. In that book I get one of the minor characters to state the theme which is essentially “there are no reasons for unreasonable things.” He’s a little bit wordier than that but that’s essentially what he says. From that point we realise more clearly what’s going on. The two protagonists made a snap decision without thinking it through and now are looking to justify (or at least understand) why they did what they did. They are kids looking for the answer to the most asked question in history: Why?
In Left the approach I use is repetition. The word ‘left’ keeps appearing in the text. People leave, others are left. The whole nature of ‘leftness’ is explored including its sinister side: if Right goes away then can Left be said to still be left of does it become something else?
Theme, as I understand it, is the most-challenging, rewarding part of writing any story, because it requires, first, a separate, complete understanding of each of the other elements, like dialogue and setting, then the ability to integrate those elements into a thought, felt whole, which is theme. I believe the reader, handed the finished work, pieces together the other elements until the theme is understood, while, for the writer, it is correct to work backwards or downwards from theme through to the individual elements, so that choices while working within any of them are made for the sake of what is being built, which is the theme.
Wow. Until I read this I thought all writers worked as I did: worry about characters, setting, and plot and the themes will take care of themselves. You've shown me a whole new way to conceive of writing a novel. Thanks.
You're welcome J.P. Hansen. We all have different ways of building a novel, and there's always something to learn from each other. I recently read one of Joanna's posts: How I Write a Scene, and the section End With a Page Turner reminded me to look at the ends of my scenes for a novel I am currently rewriting, and I am glad to say I have been able to improve many of them with just a little tweak.
Hi Charles
Yours is the way I prefer to work, but sometimes I find that I discover more about what the theme is when I am a couple of drafts in. It does mean that I have to rewrite some scenes, but that hasn’t been too much of a problem so far. I have read a book which suggests writing the first draft without working out the theme, and then reading through it to discover the patterns that reveal the theme, but I don’t think I’ll be trying that anytime soon, as I imagine it would involve much more rewrites.
George, I like your idea of working through a few drafts, too; it's another good way to start. And it occurred to me as I was reading your reply that when one has used the "theme-down" model (any model), eventually one needs a good way to get the mind "seeing" the story again; here, flat-out writing followed by looking for patterns, reading, say, for setting then for dialogue, etc., is great for freshening up the experience and keeping the mind eager to keep working on a piece. Thanks for your help.
Woo hoo. Had my concept and premise from day one, am now staring down a 400 page draft, stuck, stuck, stuck -- BECAUSE I was missing a theme. Or better put, hadn't actually articulated the theme, but there it was, staring me in the face. Thank you.
Best wishes for your novel, Julia.