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Writing a Complex Thesis for Literary Analysis

Thesis

Statements

+How to Write a Powerful Thesis

Use the thesis as the center of the essay so that every statement in the essay revolves around the ideas that you are trying to prove.

The Vietnam War induced aperpetual cycle of grief thatmany soldiers cannot shed.

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Be sure to answer the prompt completely. If you do not, your essay will be incomplete. Re-reading the question prompt after constructing a working thesis can help you fix and argument that misses the focus of the question.

From a novel or play of literary merit select an important character who is a villain. Then, in a well-organized essay, analyze the nature of the character's villainy and show how it enhances the meaning in the work. Do not merely summarize the plot.

+Make sure that the statement you make is debatable. You are not writing a report; you are thinking critically about events that occurred in the literary work. Thus, you must prove a theory through careful explanation and PROOF from the work itself.

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Do not use the words “I believe” or “I feel” for they will weaken your argument. Write the entire essay in third person ONLY.

+ Be very clear and specific. Do not make vague statements like “Ralph, Piggy, Simon and Jack represent the world.” Vague thesis statements often result in weak arguments. If a reader’s first response is “how” or “why,” your thesis is too vague, too open-ended and/or lacks guidance.

Vague: In Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad portrays the jungle as a living being.

Better: In Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad portrays the jungle as a living being in order to give Kurtz an even greater aura of power over his domain.

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If your thesis has several parts, state the information in the order you plan to present it in the essay.

The symbols of blood, the dagger and the number three permeate William Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Macbeth and infuse the drama with a tragic characterizations and a macabre tone.

+In your thesis, refer directly to the literary work you are discussing, not the theme in general. Include the characters, the author’s name or the events of the novel in your statement. You are not to keep secrets or to lend an air of mystery. State your case in exact terms!

In spite of his habits of telling “stretchers” and ditching school, Huckleberry Finn is a character of high moral integrity whose adventures portray the search of a boy for true morals amid a corrupt and hateful adult world.

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Finally, does your entire essay support your thesis specifically and without wandering? You can change your working thesis if the focus of your paper changes, but the same rules apply.

+Overly General Thesis There are images of death

everywhere in Heart of Darkness.

Marlow’s journey into the Congo is a hellish one.

The image of death, which appear throughout Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, provide a symbolic background to the theme of colonial exploration and corruption.

The images of dark and light and the symbols of death associated with the traditional journey into Hades suggest that Marlow’s journey is not a journey into the Congo, but into Hell.

/Improved Thesis

+Rubric

4Advanced

Exciting and thought-provokingIlluminates a sophisticated feature of the

text and argues its significance.

3Proficient

Compelling and complexPoints out a sophisticated feature of the

text. Addresses both content and technique. May not grapple with larger

significance.

2Basic

Defendable, but perhaps obviousThesis statement demonstrates adequate, but perhaps surface-level, understanding of the text. Addresses plot and/or content

without gesturing toward writer’s technique.

1Emerging

Undefendable Demonstrates a poor understanding,

perhaps a misreading, of the text.

+Combine the thesis with an advanced introduction to create a powerful introduction to your essay. “Dog tags…trip flares…M-60 machine guns…

silencers …hand grenades…pictures of their loved ones”–Tim O’Brien mentions all of these items in The Things They Carried to show the heavy physical burdens of the soldiers in Viet Nam. However, the soldiers also carry intangibles—”the sound of bullets…love for one another…memories…grief, terror, longing…and…each other.” None of these objects propose physical burdens, but they take their toll just the same, if not more so. Through the use of symbolism, metaphor, and simile, the emotional baggage so easily dismissed in everyday life becomes an iron weight in the men’s backpacks, dragging the weak and weary downward to despair and to death to illustrate the novel’s anti-war motif.