10 Chapter 10: Writing Analyses of Works of Fiction

Chapter 10: Writing Analyses of Works of Fiction

Being able to put some body of knowledge into words or to carry out some process like the act of analysis through your own language shows advanced mastery of a subject. This is why professors like to use student writing to evaluate proficiency in the subject matter of a course. This chapter offers some guidelines—to supplement what you learned in your college composition classes about academic writing in general—for how to put everything we have been covering in this textbook into practice as you write your own analyses of works of fiction.

Developing and Refining an Interpretive Thesis

At the heart of your analytic essay, driving it (so to speak), needs to be an interpretive thesis—an argumentative claim regarding what your work as a whole is saying about one of its core themes. Like any thesis statement, this should be phrased in a manner that is contestable, that will need to be “proven” or substantiated across the body of your essay. For example, if your interpretive thesis was “the original Star Wars trilogy of films is fundamentally about the need to sacrifice one’s individual wants and ambitions for the sake of larger social causes,” you would need to spend the body of your essay backing this claim up by showing where and how these films convey this idea through the development of plot, character, symbolism, etc.

In formulating an interpretive thesis it’s important to keep in mind what we discussed in our chapter on theme: that theme cannot be expressed by a single word (this would be a subject or topic), it needs to be a more complex and nuanced statement of the detailed “take” the work of fiction as a whole offers on the subject it takes up. For example, “Toni Morrison’s Beloved is about trauma” would not be an effective interpretive thesis, but “Toni Morrison’s Beloved is about the lingering, generational nature of trauma within African American society” would be an effective articulation of an interpretive thesis.

It is completely natural if you cannot immediately seize on and offer such a complex and nuanced thesis statement as you sit down to begin a writing project. Sometimes we have to start out more vaguely and then refine our interpretive thesis over time as we go back over the text we are analyzing, do research, and even begin formulating our thoughts through the drafting process. For instance, we might start out a writing project with only a sense that Hanif Kureishi’s story My Son the Fanatic is about gender. But then reading back through the story, taking notes on places where the issue of gender arises in it, and researching scholarly writing that focuses on this aspect of Kureishi’s story can help us to get a further grasp on just what the story is saying overall about the social operations of gender, allowing us to arrive at an interpretive thesis along the lines of “Hanif Kureishi’s My Son the Fanatic illustrates how dominant social constructions of masculinity are ultimately toxic, as they cut down on tolerance and understanding, require the subjugation of women, and lead to eruptions of violence in an effort to assert male dominance.”

Maintaining Analytic Cohesiveness and Focus

One of the key functions an interpretive thesis (or any thesis statement) serves is to provide an organizational focal point that your essay radiates out from. Everything in the body of your essay should feed back into your sole rhetorical purpose[1] of substantiating, “proving,” your interpretive thesis. There will always be other things going on in a work of fiction, other themes one might focus on (since there are always multiple themes developed in a narrative), but consideration of them doesn’t have a place in your essay.  If there are related, fascinating tangents that you come across as you develop the body of your analysis, put them in a footnote – placing them in the main body of your essay will distract and thus detract from the core lines of your analysis.

It’s particularly important to keep this question of cohesive analytic focus in mind when you are doing research and incorporating that research into your writing. When sifting through the available scholarship, you will find articles and parts of books that approach your chosen work of fiction from a variety of different analytic modalities and that focus on various different aspects of the text. If you try to shoe-horn all of these in your essay (or just the first 3 or 4 that you find), these different approaches won’t fit together into a cohesive essay, they will pull your lines of thought into a bunch of different directions, giving a “schizophrenic” quality to your essay. So you need to be selective and only draw on those scholarly sources that will allow you to advance the focus you have chosen for your essay. In other words, pick the research that you need rather than allowing yourself to be dragged in a bunch of different uncomplimentary directions by your research process. If you are analyzing the thematics of Southern identity in William Faulkner’s “Rose for Emily,” just look for works that, in part or whole, touch on this question and ignore works that focus unrelatedly on issues like gender or the genre tradition of the Southern Gothic. If you are analyzing the thematics of globalization in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sister’s Street, ignore works that you come across dealing with other aspects of the narrative like psychological trauma and sex work or ethnic difference in Nigerian society.

Drawing on and Incorporating Research

            Since we are on the subject of academic research, a few pointers here are in order. As we were just saying, your research should drive your central rhetorical purpose, not divert or distract from it. It should help you to flesh out your interpretive thesis, adding degrees of nuance and understanding to the interpretation you have developed thus far of the text you are analyzing. So it is important that you search for the most relevant research to your writing project and not just settle for the sources that you find first or are the most easy to locate – as with anything you make, your final result is only going to be as good as the raw materials you work with.

There are different ways that you might use research to help advance an analysis of a work of fiction. The easiest and often most useful way is to find scholarly sources that interpret the same text you are looking at themselves – you can then borrow points of interpretation from them, giving proper attribution to these borrowed ideas, of course. But there are other ways that you could use research to meaningfully develop an analysis of a work of fiction as well. You could use research to develop a relevant sense of cultural or socio-historical context, for example. If your analysis of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” goes into the role of 1950s Harlem in the text, it would be a good idea to use research to develop (and present in your writing) a deeper sense of the social dynamics of that place and time. You could also use research to develop a sense of context of the political or technological issues a story is dealing with. Another use of research would be to theorize the issues at hand in the text. If you are analyzing a work of fiction dealing with the nature of trauma, for instance, you might do some interdisciplinary research from the field of psychology on the nature of trauma and use this to theorize the issue at the outset of your essay. Finally, you might use research on kindred works of fiction to get a deeper sense of the kinds of issues scholars have taken up in works similar to your own. This research might proceed particularly along lines of genre. For instance, you may not find a lot of research on the particular work of young adult fiction that you are analyzing, but you can find a lot of scholarship that analyzes other works of young adult fiction or analyzes the genre as a whole, and you would then be able to apply some of these ideas to your own act of analysis.

Whatever research sources you find and decide to make use of, it is imperative that you work off of and closely engage with your research so that it is well integrated into your overall project of analysis and not tacked onto it as a kind of afterthought. Some of the worst student writing reads like “here are some of my ideas [hard stop] here’s a disconnected point from my research [hard stop] here are some more ideas from my research . . .” To avoid this, make sure you do your research at the beginning of your project, during the idea gathering (or “invention,” as writing teachers call it) phase. Take good notes on your research so that you are having to incorporate it into your own patterns of language and thought, to digest it, so to speak (and be sure to keep good track of the source and page number for these ideas, as you’ll need that to properly parenthetically document your uses of research). Then when you are drafting your essay, whenever you include a point from your research, whether by quotation or paraphrase, make sure that you have led up to it with your own prose/ideas and that you connect with/play off of it afterwards. You need to “piggyback” on your research like this, to process it and incorporate it as part of the flow of your lines of thought, so that your essay as a whole has a cohesive perspective, so that it doesn’t come off disjointedly to your reader. When students just pepper their essays with quotations that express ideas they don’t engage with before or after in their own prose (what writing teachers call “dropped quotations”), it seems like they are just including research to tick off the boxes of their assignment requirements, not using it foundationally to develop a more complex and nuanced understanding of their subject matter—which is the basic point of doing academic research in the first place and one of the defining attributes of academic writing as a genre.

A final note in regards to academic research: it is extremely important that whatever way you draw on research and however you incorporate it (via paraphrase or by quotation), you need to always cite where you have drawn information from at the end of the sentence where you are making use of it. Failure to do so in academic writing constitutes plagiarism – even if you didn’t mean to and even if you have reworked the ideas drawn from another author in your own language, you are plagiarizing if you fail to cite, and you can expect your instructor to penalize you accordingly.

Creating an Effective Organizational Structure

                We all know that effective organization is very important for any piece of writing, but how do we achieve it in an analytic essay or any other piece of academic writing? The introductory part of an essay plays a crucial role in establishing a clear and coherent organizational structure for an essay, setting forth the basic parameters of the analysis to follow, providing any necessary background information to the reader, and building up to the essay’s linchpin, the interpretive thesis statement.[2] An introduction serves to establish your focus and provide a sense of what is to follow in an essay, so a clear introduction establishes accessibly for your reader the organizational structure that is to follow. That doesn’t mean that you should write something like “This essay will look at . . .” and then make a “laundry list” of what is to follow – this is awkward and heavy-handed. Rather, lay out the core issues that are to be dealt with in the body of your essay as well as any background information (theoretical, historical, etc.) your reader will need to make clear sense of them.

Another way to create a clear organizational structure for your essay is to take readers carefully through the interrelationships between the points that you make by way of carefully phrased transitional statements. You probably learned in college composition class about using stock transitional phrases like “therefore,” “moreover,” “on the other hand,” etc. to show the relationship of one sentence or phrase to the one preceding it, as in “From the outset Balram is established as a perspicacious, convivial narrator in Adiga’s The White Tiger. However, he is also posed as an organic outgrowth from the fabric of rural Indian society, so when it becomes apparent that he has murdered his former employer. . .” But sometimes a phrase like this isn’t enough to spell out the complex interrelationship between one idea and the next, and trying to force one of these expressions into service will create an effect that is awkward[3] and unclear. This happens in particular when you are moving from one subtopic of your essay to another in a jump big enough that it necessitates a paragraph break. For instance, if you have been writing a paragraph analyzing how Arlene, the mother character in Helena Maria Viramontes’s story “Miss Clairol,” tries to use consumer goods to satisfy unmet psychological needs and then you wanted to look in your next paragraph at the roots of these needs and how the story is thereby saying something thematically about the nature of trauma, we would need to write a sentence that shows the connection between these two topic and thus “bridges” them. This could be accomplished with a sentence like, “This compensatory consumer behavior of Arlene’s has its roots in a number of forms of lack she faces in her daily life and a number of ugly experiences from her earlier life.” While it may be clear to you in your head why one idea follows another, your reader isn’t a mind-reader, and so they need to be taken carefully from point to point through your essay in this manner.

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                The following chapter provides two excellent sample essays by St. Peter’s University students to show these considerations for writing effective analyses of works of fiction being put into concrete practice. When you read them, consider the effectiveness of their interpretive theses, how they draw on research to flesh out and advance their analyses, and the strategies they employ to maintain analytic cohesiveness and a strong organizational focus.