Theme

1. Theme Insights and Deeper Meanings PART I

2. Do Now:

3. Plot Equals Story

4. Realism Equals Characters

5. Language Equals Imagery

6. Deepers Meanings Equal Symbolism

7. Theme Equals Insight

8. What is THEME? a) Theme is a message about life or human nature that an author wants you to understand. b) Theme is what the story teaches readers. c) Reminding words: Lesson, meaning, moral. d) A story can have more than one theme. e) You don’t have to agree with the theme to identify it.

9. Importance of Theme, Part I a) The theme of the story is not the same as its topic/subject. b) Topic or Subject is what the story is about. c) It can be summed up in a word or two. c) Examples: Friendship, Love, Fitting In, Change, Identity, Bravery, Family, etc. d) Theme is the message about the subject and is at least one complete sentence. Theme is NOT Topic

10. a) Literature deals with complex topics like love and death. b) These kinds of topics can have many types of themes. c) Themes will often give readers a fresh perspective on their own lives or help them recognize something new about the human condition. d) Each of us have a different point of view because we have different families, different religions, have had different experiences, and have lived in different places. Authors have different points of view as well. e) Two authors might write about the same topic but have completely different opinions or ideas about it. f) They could write about the same thing, but come up with a different theme. Topic and Theme

11. Finding Theme a)The theme can be directly stated. b) The author can tell us the message or the lesson that he or she wants us to learn. c) The theme is usually implied. d) The author hints at it, or gives us indirect clues, and we have to use those clues to make an inference about what the author wants us to learn or take away from the story.

12. Clues to Theme a) TITLE- the title can reflect a story’s topic, its theme, or both. b) What does each word in the title mean? c) What ideas does the title emphasize? d) PLOT- a story’s plot revolves around a conflict that is important to the theme. e) What conflicts do the characters face? f) How are the conflicts resolved?

13. g) CHARACTERS- what characters do and learn can reflect a theme. h) What are the main characters like? (STEAL: speech, thoughts, effect on others, actions, looks) How do the characters respond to conflicts? j) How do the characters change? k)What lessons do the characters learn? l) SETTING- the place and time of a story can suggest theme through its effects on the characters and on the events in the story. m) How does the setting influence the characters?n) n) How does the setting affect the conflict? o) What might the setting represent?

14. The BIG Idea We might get the theme from the events of the story, but theme is BIGGER than the story. Think about BIG ideas, not little details from the story. c) Themes apply to the real world. d) Themes are universal- things that anyone and everyone could learn or talk about. e) Remember: Text-to-World connections

15. A)Subject: Hate B)Subject: Love C) Theme: Hate is something that leads to destruction D) Theme: Love often comes when we least expect it How Do We Find Them?

16. Let’s Try it!

17. Subject: Teenagers Subject: High School Subject: Revenge Subject: Aging Subject: Technology Subject: Maturity Subject: Family Subject: Faith Theme: Theme: Theme: Theme: Theme: Theme: Theme: Theme: Subject vs. Theme Assignment:Use the subject and create your own theme or insight based on the subject. Format your paper with the subjects on the left and your themes on the right. Skip Lines.

18. Theme Machine

19. Finding the Theme, Part I: Identify the Subject Use the subject of the story to build your own thoughts about the meaning of the work Finding Theme

20. Finding the Theme, Part 2: Identify Character Change Identify whether a main character has realized something he/she hadn’t known before Often theme comes from what a character learns Finding Theme

21. Finding the Theme, Part 3: Identify Resolution of Conflict Conflict drives all writings and its resolution often provides a clue to the theme Finding Theme

22. Finding the Theme, Part 4: Study the Title of a Work Does it have a special meaning? Does it give clues to the theme? Finding Theme

23. Theme Machine

24. Common Literary Themes (Themes repeated in many works)

25. Friend Love Love of Country Admiration Possessiveness Physical Love Romance Logical Type Love Self-centered love Game-Playing Unrequited love Godly love Familial love Infatuation Jealousy 11. Love: Topics/Effects

26. Theme Machine

27. Twilight Zone Theme Machine • Read through the story more than 1 time • Try to answer each question in the theme map—try to find significance for each!

28. A Kind of a Stopwatch

29. A Kind of a Stopwatch • Patrick McNulty, a talkative and unpopular know-it-all, befriends an odd man named Potts. Potts offers him a stopwatch, "an old family heirloom" in exchange for his friendship. Thinking it's an odd gift, McNulty soon realizes that when the button is pressed, the stopwatch is capable of stopping all of time itself. • Excited with his new toy, he unsuccessfully uses it in an attempt to win a job, change the world for the better and make himself some friends. Disappointed at the failed results, McNulty finds another use for it—making big money. While he is robbing a bank, he drops the watch and it breaks—leaving the universe forever frozen in time except for McNulty, who now has no one to talk to or interact with, and is all alone in a still world, screaming to all his former acquaintences, "Somebody move!  TALK!! Say something!!! HELP!!!!"

30. Title: A Kind of Stopwatch Subject: How the main character changes: How the conflict is resolved: What the title suggests: Theme: Theme Map

31. Eye of the Beholder

32. Eye of the Beholder • Janet Tyler has undergone her eleventh treatment in an attempt to look like everybody else. The details of the treatment are not given, but Tyler is first shown with her head completely bandaged, so her face cannot be seen. She is described as being "not normal" by the nurses and doctor. • The outcome of the procedure cannot be known until the bandages are removed. Tyler pleads with the doctor and eventually convinces him to remove the bandages early. After a climactic buildup, the bandages are removed, revealing to the audience that she is beautiful. However the reaction of the doctor and nurses is disappointment; the operation has failed, her face has undergone "no change — no change at all". • At this point, the doctor, nurses and other people in the hospital, whose faces have never been seen clearly before, are now revealed to be horribly deformed in the audience's perspective, with large brows, curled lips, and misshapen, pig-like snouts. Distraught by the failure of the procedure, Tyler runs through the hospital as the terrible faces of everyone she runs into, apparently the norm in this society, are revealed. • Eventually, a handsome man afflicted with the same "condition" arrives to take the crying, despondent Tyler into exile to a village of her "own kind", where her "ugliness" will not trouble the State. Before the two leave, the man comforts Tyler with the "very, very old saying" that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder".

33. Title: Subject: How the main character changes: How the conflict is resolved: What the title suggests: Theme: Theme Map

34. Time Enough to Last

35. Time Enough to Last • Bemis, a bank teller, loves reading books more than almost anything else • As Bemis's day progresses, both his boss and his wife are shown to think his obsessive reading a waste of time. At one point, his wife, as a cruel joke, asks him to read her poetry from a book. He eagerly obliges, only to find that she has defaced all the pages. • The next day, Henry takes his lunch (and reading) break in the bank's vault, where he won't be disturbed. The camera shows the newspaper's foretelling headline: “Nuclear Bomb: Capable of Total Destruction". Moments later, loud explosions can be heard from outside, violently shaking the vault and knocking Bemis unconscious. In the aftermath of the apparent war, he regains consciousness and emerges to find he is the last person alive on Earth, everybody else having been killed by the bomb. Bemis searches desperately for his wife.  • Bemis finds himself in a world of both abundance and emptiness, with food to last him a lifetime and sheer loneliness taking its toll on his sanity. As he loses hope and is about to commit suicide with a gun, he sees the ruins of the public library. He examines them more closely to find all its books still intact and readable. All the books he could ever hope for are his for the taking, and he finally has all the time in the world to read—with no one to stop him. • Bemis contently sorts the books he intends to read for the next several years. Just as he reaches to pick up his first book, he stumbles and his glasses fall off and shatter. In tears, he picks up the remains of his glasses and sobs, "That's not fair. That's not fair at all. There was time now. There was all the time I needed... ! It's not fair!"

36. Title: Time Enough to Last Subject: How the main character changes: How the conflict is resolved: What the title suggests: Theme: Theme Map

37. Night Call

38. Night Call • An elderly, wheelchair-bound lady named Elva Keene receives strange anonymous phone calls. At first the caller says nothing, and all that can be heard is static. In subsequent calls, he can be heard moaning. After several calls, Elva says repeatedly, "Hello? Hello?" The caller finally says slowly, garbled, and weakly, "Hello?". Elva demands to know who is calling, but the only response is "Hello?" Finally the caller manages to get out the words, "Where are you? I want to talk to you." • Elva has had enough and screams at the man to leave her alone. There are no more calls and the phone company traces the source to a fallen telephone line. • Elva and her housekeeper visit the location of the line given by the telephone operator. To the astonishment of both, they find themselves at a cemetery, and they find that the line is resting on the grave of Elva's long-deceased fiancé, Brian Douglas. Elva says that she always insisted upon having her own way, and Brian always did what she said. A week before they were to be married, she insisted upon driving, and lost control of the car. The accident left Brian dead, and she, a lonely cripple. Now she can talk to him again, she won't have to be alone. • At home, she picks up the phone and calls out to Brian. She pleads with him to answer so that she can talk to him. He replies that she has told him to leave her alone, and that he always does what she says. Then the line goes dead, leaving Elva alone and crying in her bed.

39. Title: Night Call Subject: How the main character changes: How the conflict is resolved: What the title suggests: Theme: Theme Map

40. To Serve Man

41. To Serve Man • The story opens at a special session of the United Nations where three alien emissaries, the pig-like Kanamit, are testifying that the purpose of their mission to Earth is "to bring to you the peace and plenty which we ourselves enjoy, and which we have in the past brought to other races throughout the galaxy." The aliens soon supply Earth with cheap unlimited power, a device that suppresses explosions, and drugs for prolonging life. As a further token of friendship they allow humans to visit their home planet via ten-year "exchange groups". • A friend of the narrator, a UN translator named Gregori, steals one of the Kanamit's books, and he and the narrator attempt to translate it, via a basic Kanamit-English dictionary provided by the aliens. After some weeks they determine that the title is "To Serve Man". Two weeks later, the narrator returns from a trip to find Gregori distraught. Gregori says that he has translated the first chapter of the book: • "It's a cookbook," he said.

42. Title: To Serve Man Subject: How the main character changes: How the conflict is resolved: What the title suggests: Theme: Theme Map