Did you catch the reference to Peter Pan? Wendy and Peter are allusions based on characters in
Peter Pan because of their imagination; they imagine living without their parents. But in Peter Pan
they achieve it by going off to Neverland, not by having their parents eaten by lions.
Think about the argument between George and Lydia about the nursery, and after their experience
(the very real feeling that they were in danger of being attacked by "imaginary" lions) in the nursery,
Lydia asks George to lock it up. George is skeptical because of the angry way Wendy and Peter react
when they're forbidden to go in the room ("They live for the nursery") (1-5).
When formulating a literary theme:
1. A theme does not refer to characters or action in a story under examination.
2. A (stated) theme (for class purposes) does not contain personal pronouns.
3. A theme must be stated as a sentence with a subject and predicate; one or
two words such as "love", "greed", "God", "man's struggle", etc. are not themes.
4. A theme is not a lesson or moral or warning or some trite cliche; "Be careful
what you ask for", "Be grateful for what you have" are not themes.
5. A theme is an insight about the nature of things (human behavior, man's
social and cultural interactions, and humanity's relationships with its environment)
revealed through close reading and examination of a literary text.
”One possible theme readers may understand from 'The Vedlt' is...". You must supply the comment
for your thesis and it should revolve somehow around the relationships between parents and children.
Ideas:
ALIENTATION: the parents are alienated from life by the a mechanized society that dehumanizes by
controlling too many aspects of their lives, alienated from their children by those same machines and
choice; the children are alienated from their parents by anger and betrayal and by those darn
machines again...
It's easier to kill what you don't care about.