Literary Analysis Essay

                              Literary Analysis Essay

English 242

One of your two major writing assignments this semester is to compose a literary analysis essay for Ernest Hemingway’s classic novella The Old Man and the Sea.This essay will be  four pages in length and will follow typical formatting guidelines of 12pt. font size and one-inch margins. It will also adhere to MLA Style guidelines and contain a bibliography of cited sources.

 What does a literary analysis essay look like, exactly, and how does one write such a paper? Think of a literary analysis essay as an act of translating the “bigger picture” of a text for intelligent readers who are struggling to understand what they should be getting from the text. In essence, what does the text (story, poem, novel, etc.) mean and what messages should readers take away from it? This will require you, the writer, to focus on a specific interpretive claim (thesis) and develop an argument around that claim. The main interpretive claim made in any literary analysis essay must be debatable in nature. Your claim cannot be a commonly held belief or a statement of fact, but rather a unique interpretation that you wish others to accept. In this way, you will be drawing upon your experience from writing argumentation essays in former composition courses, particularly 112. Oftentimes students struggle with the concept of debate, or simply find themselves uncomfortable with the process of attempting to convince others to think a certain way. Just remember that readers having questions about your interpretation is a sign you are on the right track. Understand that arguments that take risks—that point out the nonobvious in the claim—are valued in literary analysis. A well-constructed analysis centered around a debatable claim not only demonstrates critical thinking skills, but it works to push the collective conversation about a work of literature, which is at the heart of why literature is regularly studied and appreciated.

How to Begin

 The first step in constructing a focused literary analysis is to develop an interpretative statement about the text. Just as one should develop a thesis statement before creating an outline for an essay, you will want to decide upon a specific, narrowed interpretation about the novella before moving forward with this task. This assignment is not a book report, a book review, or a biographical sketch of the author! When analyzing the text, you are thinking of a message or greater meaning that is “hidden” within the story and occasionally brought to the surface by way of particular elements at work. An interpretative statement could be made about a number of ideas. For instance, the writer could focus on an aspect of human nature found within the text (everyone has a certain degree of perseverance, thirst for power, desire for knowledge, etc. within him or her), an observation about society (people live in their phones more than in their minds, sports are valued more than education, etc.), the author’s attempt to make a political statement (the 99% in America have become financially enslaved, etc.), or a philosophical statement (humans only engage in good deeds to benefit themselves in some way, etc.). Of course, there are many, many other roads of focus a writer could travel down. The point is, you will interpret the text and then make a statement about the text, thus allowing you to develop the remainder of your essay around supporting that statement (claim). Here are some examples of thesis statements one might find in a literary analysis essay:

• In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the author parallels the unjust treatment of slaves like Jim to the treatment Huck receives at the hands of Pa to show that a society that owns slaves cannot be just, no matter how “civilized” that society believes and proclaims itself to be.
• George A. Romero uses the setting of a shopping mall to satirize American consumer culture. By placing his thoughtless zombies in a commercial setting, Romero shows us how consumerism drains us of individual agency and makes us incapable of intellectual thought.
• The treatment of women in Hamlet shows both the limited roles women could play in the Renaissance and the fears men of that time had toward female sexuality.
• The recurring motif of dug-up fossils in Breece Pancake’s “Trilobites” illustrates the inner conflict the protagonist experiences as he weighs whether to work the ancestral land, or set off on his own.

With each of these examples you will notice that a specific (and narrowed) interpretation is being made by the author. Have you ever watched a movie with a friend and when discussing it afterward found that your friend had a completely different take on the movie? If so, did you answer that friend with, “that’s not how I interpreted it” or “that wasn’t how I saw the movie”? Well, that’s how this interpretative statement business works. Some might read the statements above and totally disagree with them, believing the author of the statement to be “off” or misguided in his or her interpretation. That is a good thing though. Such debate fosters critical thinking and growth, and a newfound appreciation for the work at hand. This is the approach you must take. When considering a specific interpretative strategy, remember to focus on the literary elements at work within the novella. These could include: setting, irony, time and sequence, characterization, plot, comparisons, word usage, and so on.

How to Support

 Once you have developed an interpretative statement and decided on a strategy for structure, the next step to writing a successful literary analysis essay is to provide specific evidence from the text to support your claim. A healthy debate cannot be won without evidence for support, and the same will hold true for the purpose of this assignment. Again, think back to the argumentation essays you wrote in your composition courses. You likely had to take a stance on a controversial issue then incorporate research findings into your essay that backed your points of support for the thesis. You are doing the same here, only the evidence isn’t gathered through extensive research methods. All the evidence you need is within the novella itself. The work comes from you “digging” for that evidence, and such evidence can only be unearthed through close reading practices.

Once you have located specific extracts that work to illustrate the point you are making, it is then a matter of incorporating that evidence into your essay by way of summarizing and quoting. Textual evidence is of the utmost importance for completing this assignment successfully. You cannot write an ‘A’ paper without providing a healthy amount of evidence! As is the case with any essay, remember that you must strike the perfect balance when quoting from the text. You do not want to flood your essay with quotes so that you drown out your own voice. I won’t be impressed with your effort simply because it contains numerous quotes from the text. In fact, I will have the opposite reaction. I will consider such work an attempt to mask the fact that the writer had nothing interesting to say him or herself! On the flip side, make sure you provide enough evidence. Don’t skimp on quotes, which provides the appearance of a writer who failed to closely read or put in the time. Two quotes in the entire essay are simply not enough.

Here is an example, taken from Digging into Literature: Strategies for Reading, Analysis, and Writing by Joanne Wolfe and Laura Wilder:

In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice goes through a variety of absurd physical changes that symbolize the changes of an adolescent’s body during puberty. In Chapter 1, Alice is alternately too big and then too small to fit through the door leading to the garden. In Chapter IV, Alice becomes a giant, filling up an entire house and causing the animals outside to attack her. In Chapter V, her neck grows to an absurd length. These physical changes frustrate Alice and make her feel like an outcast. For instance, the dormouse tells Alice “you’ve got no right to grow here” and accuses her of growing “in a ridiculous fashion” (53). Similarly, when Alice is stuck in the house, she sorrowfully reflects that she is all grown up, or “at least there’s no room to grow up any more here” (15). These passages show how Alice’s body marks her as a stranger who fits in neither the child nor the adult world.

I don’t know about you, but having watched the animated film version of this classic story, the idea of puberty never crossed my mind. Reading the excerpt above, however, such an interpretation makes sense, and it is the provided evidence that ultimately works to convince me of this statement’s possibility. Notice how the writer utilizes both summary and quoting to support the interpretation. And also notice how MLA Style guidelines are closely followed to present this evidence. Signal phrases are properly used to introduce quotes, page numbers are presented in parentheses, and follow-up explanations in the writer’s words are provided. This is how your own essay should look, only on a larger scale as you compose a minimum of four complete pages for the assignment.