Matakuliah : G0302/Introduction to Literature
Tahun
: 2007
Introduction
Pertemuan 7
Theme
• The theme of a piece of fiction is its controlling idea or its
central insight. It is the unifying generalization about life
stated or implied by the story.
• To derive the theme of a story, we must ask what its
central purpose is: what view of life it supports or what
insight into life it reveals.
• Not all stories have theme.
• Theme exists in all interpretive fiction.
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Theme
• The principles of theme:
1. Theme must be expressible in the form of a statement
with a subject and a predicate.
2. The theme must be stated as a generalization about
life.
3. We must be careful not to make the generalization
larger than is justified by the terms of the story.
4. Theme is the central and unifying concept of a story.
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Theme
• 5. There is no one way of stating the theme of a
story.The story is not a guessing game or an acrostic
that is supposed to yield some magic verbal formula that
won’t work if a syllable is changed.
• 6. We should avoid any statement that reduces the
theme to some familiar saying that we heard all our lives.
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Point of view: the omniscient point of view
• 1. In the omniscient point of view, the story is told by a
narrator using the third person, whose knowledge and
prerogative are unlimited.. He is free to go wherever he
wishes, to peer inside the minds and hearts of his
characters at will and tell us what they are thinking or
feeling
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Point of view: the limited omniscient point of
view
• 2. In the limited omniscient point of view, the author tells
the story in the third person, but he tells it from the
viewpoint of one character in the story. The author
places himself at the elbow of this character, so to
speak, and looks at the events of the story through his
eyes and through his mind.
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Point of view: the first-person point of view
• 3. In the first-person point of view, the author disappears
into one of the characters, who tells the story in the first
person. This character again, may be either a major or
minor character, protagonist or observer, and it will make
considerable difference whether the protagonist tells the
story or someone else tells it.
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Point of view: the objective point of view
• 4. In the objective point of view, the narrator disappears
into a kind of roving sound camera. This camera can go
anywhere but can record only what is seen and heard. It
cannot comment, interpret, or enter a character’s mind.
With this point of view sometimes also called the
dramatic point of view) the reader is placed in the
position of spectator at a movie or play.
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