Theme in Literature

Learning to find the theme of a piece of literature can be a little difficult if you are someone who only sees things in black or white. For if we are insisted to find the theme of the story this could be "viewed as an avoidance of the literary experience", because many stories are ranged from a series of complex emotions that could inspire many different themes. This is why finding a theme cannot be viewed from a black or white mindset, but rather a mind that explores the grey areas of the text. These areas could be words that have more than one meaning, or words that are purposely positioned in the text to create symbolism. Literature is truly an artwork, you can study it and have multiple meanings that develop in your mind, while another person can also study the same literature and construe completely different thoughts/ meanings.

I read the story, "Little Red Riding Hood", to my roommate and at the end I asked her what she thought the theme was or simply a message she thought the author was trying to get across to the reader. Her answer was that she thought it was warning people about deceit while I thought it was more about knowing your surroundings so that you may have better discernment about bad situations. Both of our thoughts had taken different angles of the story but both connected in some way about being careful of other people. Another take on this story was what the book said about the moral. It took a literal approach by directing the story specifically for young girls who should not listen to just anyone who happens to cross their path. It when on to say that little girls can be naive about men being predators to them and will openly talk to strangers with out even thinking about it. By doing so this, it has been a huge contributing factor of why young girls find themselves in harmful situations. So obviously, the story does not have one precise theme, but rather multiple possibilities of different themes.

With many different morals of the story, "Little Red Riding Hood" or any other piece of literature, one can realize that theme "doesn't need to be boiled down to a moral even when a moral is offered". When we, as readers, read stories, we need to be more open and less absolute about what we consider to be the moral of a story. A great goal to consider is instead of always trying to find the answer for a story, perhaps it is better to raise ideas about the meaning of a particular text and discuss it with others. This chapter taught me a lot about deepening my thought process and opening my mind to many possibilities when considering a theme for literature.