Video: How to Identify a Short Story Theme

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Identifying a short story theme requires figuring out whose story it is, how someone achieves the overall goal and what the moral undertones of the story are. Decipher a short story theme, paying attention to who goes through the most change, with tips from a published author and English professor in this free video on writing.

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Video Transcript

It's easy enough to tell what happens in a short story but it is much harder to identify the theme. The theme isn't always based on what happens. The first thing we have to look for is whose story is it? The story isn't always about the person who appears to be the protagonist so we look at who is changed in this story? The protagonist may be the one who does a lot of things and achieves his or her goals but if someone else is changed then it might be that other person's story. This is more likely in a novel than a short story but you have to be careful in any case. So whose story is it? Who achieves or spectacularly fails to achieve goals? That's the core of the short story is somebody needs to achieve some goal so who is blocked from it is as important as who succeeds at it. Every story has a moral element, sometimes that moral element is that there is no morality or that life is absurd but that is always present so someone is being rewarded or punished for a certain kind of behavior. What kind of behavior is that that is being rewarded? That's the kind of behavior that the story is endorsing so once we know what the moral position of the story is then we can look and see well how does that fit in? How can we develop a theme, a general idea from the story from that and once you nail down those things you should be able to work the rest out.

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How to Identify a Short Story Theme

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