How to write a theme essay has become a penitent question not only for scholars but professionals as well. Putting together the essentials and implementing the theme essay format is not a walk in the park for many.
Now that you are here, you will learn how to write a theme paper and score the best results. Let your lecturer use your theme essay as a benchmark for the rest of the class for the first time!
What is a Theme Essay?
To understand this better, we’ll have to ask ourselves what a theme is first. The theme refers to the prevailing central idea in a literary work. Therefore, a theme essay is a paper where a student writes on a specific question or theme from a poem, storybook, song, or drama.
The whole essay will, therefore, revolve around the theme or central idea. To achieve this, you will need literary devices such as:
- Comparison
- Imagery
- Foreshadowing
- Personification
- Metaphor
There are plenty of themes that you can write on, such as love, corruption, religion, etc.
How To Start a Theme Essay From Scratch
Did you know that without a theme analysis essay example, you can still write one? Well, these sections seek to empower you on how to write a theme essay from an idea to the final paper.
As in any other paper, the theme essay format begins with a hook introduction, a comprehensive body, and an appealing conclusion. Therefore, you will start with:
- An intriguing claim about the subject of discussion in the introduction
- Follow with a well-thought-out background information
- Finish off with a thesis statement reflecting the central theme of the story
Your theme essay outline should be the yardstick for every sentence or paragraph you choose to include in your essay. The body paragraphs and the conclusion will fall into place once you start your paper on the right note.
Stay with me as we explore how to write theme essays from the following novels:
To Kill a Mockingbird Theme Essay: All You Need To Know
The novel by Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird, is rich with a great source of themes. Despite having a wide range of themes, Lee emphasizes three of them in his excellent book:
- Courage
- Lady
- Standing in another man’s shoes
For instance, if you are writing on courage, Mrs. Dubose would be a perfect reference point despite his wickedness. You can also explore Jem’s courage in response to his strive against Mrs. Dubose. They did many acts in the passage, which point to the overriding theme of courage in the novel.
The other theme of ‘lady’ plays out quite well in the life of Scout. More specifically, you could refer to her answer on what occupation best suits her. Show the various details in the novel that mark ‘a lady’ such as wearing breeches and appearance. Uncle Jack’s comment when Scout punches Francis and her ring finger is cut would be a significant pointer.
When you’ve been tasked to talk about standing in another man’s shoes, you could use Bob and Atticus. When he (Bob) spat on Atticus’ face, Atticus reminded Jem to look at Bob’s point of view. The end goal was to see how Atticus had ruined Bob’s reputation.
Lord of the Flies Theme Essay: Pro Tricks
Knowing how to write a theme analysis essay begins with first understanding the storyline. After that, you will be able to know how the different themes contribute to the message of the novel. Such is the same with Lord of the Flies.
Evil is one of the central themes that William Golding stresses in this book. Therefore, you can have a theme essay example on evil by focusing on the novel’s boys. See how they come from civilized backgrounds but end up being savages. Their evil behaviors, such as destroying the environment, violent hunting, and killing their fellow human beings, are a few examples to use.
To amplify your point, make use of quotations from the text that back up your claim. For example:
- Kill the beast!
- Cut his throat!
- Spill his blood!
The adjectives in these expressions show the fierceness that the boys have developed. You can almost feel their anger and rage, which results in doing an evil act. In order to get a better understanding of what’s expected here, take a look at this essay sample.
Lord Of The Flies – Theme Essay Example
The imagery of the beast in The Lord of the Flies functions as a symbol of fear and insecurity. The emergence of the beast is a logical consequence of the narrative of the story: young boys, having through a plane crash been abandoned on a deserted island, are left to survive for themselves. Within this context of uncertainty and fear, the boys attempt to organize themselves in order to survive. Yet the overwhelming nature of the task – their youth coupled with their being separated from any of the various social institutions that have shaped their lives from the beginning – leaves them in a position of profound uncertainty. The belief in the beast is thus an external manifestation of the fears that they feel in regard to the dire nature of their situation: they believe in the beast to the extent that they themselves are deeply afraid of their state.
The beast is at the same time, however, an irrational fear, in so far as the beast itself obviously does not exist. In other words, it is irrational because its existence does not coincide with the standards of rational thought: it is mysterious, elusive, unable to be directly beheld – its existence has no connection with what we know to be reality. Yet at the same time, the beast can be said to be very real, to the extent that it is a manifestation of the boys’ own fear: their separation from any security now takes an outer form in the figure of the beast. Rather than pacifying the boys’ inner fear, the image of the beast heightens this fear: it is in this sense that it can be called a mobilizer of fear. The belief in the beast forces the boys to act in a different manner: it shapes their conduct and their actions. The beast thus has an almost contagious function: instead of somehow pacifying the boys’ internal fear in the face of the very real direness of their situation, it heightens it, making the situation even more desperate and eventually leading to the boys turning against each other.
This imagery can be presented in parallel to some fundamental concepts in international relations and political science. In The Lord of the Flies, conflict among the boys is motivated by fear: the fear in light of their situation ultimately turns them against each other. The realist argument from international relations, i.e., that “international anarchy is the permissive cause of war”, follows much the same logic: to the extent that there is an absence of order in the world, to the extent that we are faced with uncertainty and a lack of firmly established social institutions, war becomes permissible as an attempt to establish order in the face of this chaos. Accordingly, this argument is motivated by fear of the unknown, by the fear of uncertainty. What the argument fails to address, when read in light of The Lord of the Flies, however, is the element fear plays in this interpretation: is the proper motivation for political actions a fear of the unknown and the maintenance of security?
Certainly, in international relations, this is a clear cause for action: states such as the U.S. attempt to maintain their security, for example, in the forms of “preventative wars.” But what type of fear is at stake here? In this case, it would be the fear that a country loses its dominance and monopoly over the world, or from another perspective, such actions attempt to extend hegemony and power. In this sense, fear is used as a tool by political decision makers so as to justify their decisions to the broader public: the ultimate aim of such actions, however, are perhaps to further establish the social institutions that oppose “international anarchy”, i.e., the blind spot in the political power. In other words, these stable social institutions which oppose “international anarchy” are controlled by these same political decision makers: to maintain their existence is to maintain their power.
With these tricks and tips, writing theme essays will be fast and cheap for you! The struggle of how or where to start has finally been done away with once and for all.
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