What is a theme?
The underlying idea or question a story is really about, beneath its events. A theme is abstract, you state it as an idea, not a thing.
How to spot it: Ask what the story is arguing about: the cost of ambition, what makes us human, whether the past can be escaped.
Often confused with motif: A motif is the concrete thing that recurs (a mirror); the theme is the idea it serves (identity).
13 themes in the vocabulary
The cost of ambition
The idea that reaching for greatness, knowledge, or power exacts a price on the one who pursues it and on those around them.
6 works
What makes us human
The question of where the boundary of humanity lies, whether it is defined by biology, emotion, memory, or the capacity for empathy.
11 works
Man versus nature
The struggle of human beings against the indifferent or hostile forces of the natural world and their own limits within it.
9 works
The individual versus society
The tension between a person's freedom or conscience and the demands, conformity, or control of the collective they live in.
14 works
Hubris and its comeuppance
The theme that excessive pride or overreaching against natural or divine limits invites downfall.
9 works
Loss of innocence
The movement from naivety to hard-won knowledge, as a character or society confronts a darker or more complex reality.
3 works
Mortality and the fear of death
The human confrontation with finitude, the desire to transcend, deny, or make meaning of death.
3 works
Freedom versus security
The trade-off a society or person makes between liberty and the comfort or safety of control and order.
2 works
Alienation and isolation
The condition of being estranged, whether from other people, from society, or from oneself, and the search for connection.
8 works
Memory and identity
The idea that who we are is constituted by memory, and what happens to the self when memory is altered, lost, or false.
11 works
Power and corruption
The theme that the acquisition and exercise of power tends to corrupt the individuals and institutions that hold it.
3 works
Free will versus determinism
The question of whether choices are genuinely free or predetermined by fate, biology, prophecy, or social forces.
10 works
Fear of the Other
The anxiety and hostility directed at what is foreign or unknown, and how a society constructs and treats its outsiders.
7 works