Literary Analysis

We define Literature as “written work valued for superior or lasting artistic merit.” As an adjective, then, literary is defined as “of or relating to the writing, study, or content of literature, esp. of the kind valued for quality of form; of the nature of literature.” Finally, analysis is essentially the breaking apart of anything into its composite parts for close examination. Literary analysis, then, is the deep examination of a work of literature. When you think of literary analysis, think of holding up a magnifying glass to the details of language in a work of literature.

Magnifying glass magnifying the word mag-ni-fi-er
Image 2.3 (Credit: “Magnifier 1” by Dave Edens from Flickr.com used according to CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Literary Analysis = Close Reading

Students may have encountered previous teachers using the term “close reading.” When teachers use this term, it usually means engaging with a text on a deeper level than when reading for entertainment or information: that is, looking not just at what is written (the message, also known as content) but how it is said (the language used to send the message, also known as form). Literary Analysis and Close Reading are two words with, for all intents and purposes, the same meaning. The major difference is that while close reading techniques can be used in any form of writing, literary analysis is more specific to the field of literature.

When performing literary analysis, some questions literary critics, or scholars of literature, might ask themselves include:

  • What is the theme or motif of this text?
  • What patterns can I detect across this text, or what patterns can I detect across this genre of literature that are also present in this text? And what might these patterns indicate about the meaning or significance of this text?
  • What literary devices are featured in this text? How might an analysis of these formal features deepen understanding of the text?
  • What kinds of characters are featured in this text?
  • What qualities make literature “good” or of “lasting artistic merit” (“literature 3b”)?
  • How might the language or diction of the text reflect cultural or historical meanings most common readers miss? How might such meanings deepen or illuminate our understanding of the text?
  • What have previous scholars misinterpreted or missed about this work, and how can I bring neglected aspects of this text to light?
  • In what ways does this text engage with or elucidate other works of literature, philosophical theories, historical events, or social movements?
  • What might this text reveal about what it means to be human? How might it deepen my understanding of my place in the world?

How to Perform A Literary Analysis

The previous questions might seem amorphous or overwhelming in their implications. So, how can we practice close reading in a practical way?

  1. Read the text 3 times: once to get the gist. Once, for deep understanding. And, lastly, once for deep analysis. Literary critics often read the same texts many more times! Don’t be afraid to read as many times as you need.
  2. Engage with the text. Highlight, annotate, mark pages with sticky notes or flags, and take notes as you read. Look for anything weird, surprising, confusing, or exciting that jumps out at you. Why do you think this feature exists in the text? Don’t be afraid to write down any questions that bubble up as you read: it is likely other scholars/students have questions, too, and sharing your questions with classmates or your professor might prompt a fascinating discussion! For example, an observant student once asked (his question is paraphrased here): “In Hamlet by William Shakespeare, I noticed Hamlet and Horatio seem to think the ghost of Old Hamlet is actually a demon. But later Hamlet seems to think the ghost is an actual ghost. Gertrude does not see the ghost, making it seem like it is a figment of Hamlet’s troubled mind. What are we as readers meant to believe?” This question prompted other students to share their cultural heritage’s perspective on demons and the afterlife and even to share ghost stories. Eventually, this discussion led students to research Elizabethan perspectives on ghosts and demons. This made for a lively class discussion and several strong essays all because one student dared to engage with the text by asking a question!
  3. Keep track of any patterns. Does a certain image keep popping up, like a heart, a rose, or a color? This might be a symbol: a physical object signifying an abstract meaning. What might this repeated image mean in the context of the rest of the story? For example, in Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” the color gray repeats many, many times. Why? What might this indicate about the color gray? What might the color gray have symbolized to Bierce or to readers alive during the Civil War?
  4. Deeply examine and question literary features such as titles, characters, settings, figurative language, and dialogue. Constantly ask yourself: why is this here? As readers, we should usually assume authors, as masters of their craft, make choices intentionally. And even if unintentional, what might subconscious slips indicate about meaning? In short, how does the form or structure of this writing influence my understanding of its message?
  5. Other literary features you might examine include:pronouns, active vs. passive voice, verbs (what tense is being used? any tense shifts?), nouns, word order or syntax, rhyme, paragraphing, italics, space on the page, text space (how much space or description or lines does a given character receive?), proximity (do similar words, phrases, characters, or ideas often occur in close proximity?). All of these seemingly small details can hold big implications!

Writing a Literary Analysis

Introduction

You want to begin your analysis with a paragraph that provides the context of the work you are analyzing and a brief account of what you believe to be the poem or story or play’s main theme. At a minimum, your account of the work’s context will include the name of the author, the title of the work, its genre, and the date and place of publication. If there is an important biographical or historical context to the work, you should include that, as well. Try to express the work’s theme in one or two sentences. Theme, you will recall, is the insight into human experience the author offers to readers, usually revealed as the content, the drama, the plot of the poem, story, or play as it unfolds and the characters interact. Assessing theme can be a complex task. Authors usually show the theme; they don’t tell it. They rarely say, at the end of the story, words to this effect: “and the moral of my story is…” They tell their story, develop their characters, provide some kind of conflict—and from all of this, a theme emerges.

Because identifying theme can be challenging and subjective, it is often a good idea to work through the rest of the analysis, then return to the beginning and assess theme in light of your analysis of the work’s other literary elements.

Here is a good example of an introductory paragraph from Ben’s analysis of William Butler Yeats’ poem, “Among School Children”:

“Among School Children” was published in Yeats’ 1928 collection of poems, The Tower. It was inspired by a visit Yeats made in 1926 to a school in Waterford, an official visit in his capacity as a senator of the Irish Free State. In the course of the tour, Yeats reflects upon his own youth and the experiences that shaped the “sixty-year old, smiling public man” (line 8) he has become. Through his reflection, the theme of the poem emerges: a life has meaning when connections among apparently disparate experiences are forged into a unified whole.

Body Paragraphs

In the body of your literature analysis, you want to guide your readers through a tour of the poem, story, or play, pausing along the way to comment on, analyze, interpret, and explain key incidents, descriptions, dialogue, symbols, the writer’s use of figurative language—any of the elements of literature that are relevant to a sound analysis of this particular work. Your main goal is to explain how these elements work to elucidate, augment, and develop the theme.

The elements of literature are common across genres: a story, a narrative poem, and a play all have a plot and characters. But certain genres prefer certain literary elements. In a poem, for example, form, imagery and metaphor might be especially important; in a story, setting and point-of-view might be more important than they are in a poem; in a play, dialogue, stage directions, lighting serve functions rarely relevant in the analysis of a story or poem.

The length of the body of an analysis of a literary work will usually depend upon the length of the work being analyzed—the longer the work, the longer the analysis—though your instructor will likely establish a word limit for this assignment. Make certain that you do not simply paraphrase the plot of the story or play, or the content of the poem. This is a common weakness in student literary analyses, especially when the analysis is of a poem or a play.

Here is a good example of two body paragraphs from Amelia’s analysis of “Araby” by James Joyce:

Within the story’s first few paragraphs occur several religious references which will accumulate as the story progresses. The narrator is a student at the Christian Brothers’ School; the former tenant of his house was a priest; he left behind books called The Abbot and The Devout Communicant. Near the end of the story’s second paragraph the narrator describes a “central apple tree” in the garden, under which is “the late tenant’s rusty bicycle pump.” We may begin to suspect the tree symbolizes the apple tree in the Garden of Eden and the bicycle pump, the snake which corrupted Eve, a stretch, perhaps, until Joyce’s fall-of-innocence theme becomes more apparent.

The narrator must continue to help his aunt with her errands, but, even when he is so occupied, his mind is on Mangan’s sister, as he tries to sort out his feelings for her. Here Joyce provides vivid insight into the mind of an adolescent boy at once elated and bewildered by his first crush. He wants to tell her of his “confused adoration,” but he does not know if he will ever have the chance. Joyce’s description of the pleasant tension consuming the narrator is conveyed in a striking simile, which continues to develop the narrator’s character, while echoing the religious imagery, so important to the story’s theme: “But my body was like a harp, and her words and gestures were like fingers, running along the wires.”

Conclusion

The concluding paragraph of your analysis should realize two goals. First, it should present your own opinion on the quality of the poem or story or play about which you have been writing. And, second, it should comment on the current relevance of the work. You should certainly comment on the enduring social relevance of the work you are explicating. You may comment, though you should never be obliged to do so, on the personal relevance of the work.

Here is the concluding paragraph from Dao-Ming’s analysis of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest:

First performed in 1895, The Importance of Being Earnest has been made into a film, as recently as 2002 and is regularly revived by professional and amateur theatre companies. It endures not only because of the comic brilliance of its characters and their dialogue, but also because its satire still resonates with contemporary audiences. I am still amazed that I see in my own Asian mother a shadow of Lady Bracknell, with her obsession with finding for her daughter a husband who will maintain, if not, ideally, increase the family’s social status. We might like to think we are more liberated and socially sophisticated than our Victorian ancestors, but the starlets and eligible bachelors who star in current reality television programs illustrate the extent to which superficial concerns still influence decisions about love and even marriage. Even now, we can turn to Oscar Wilde to help us understand and laugh at those who are earnest in name only.

Dao-Ming’s conclusion is brief, but she does manage to praise the play, reaffirm its main theme, and explain its enduring appeal. And note how her last sentence cleverly establishes that sense of closure that is also a feature of an effective analysis.

You may, of course, modify the template that is presented here. Your instructor might favor a somewhat different approach to literary analysis. Its essence, though, will be your understanding and interpretation of the theme of the poem, story, or play and the skill with which the author shapes the elements of literature—plot, character, form, diction, setting, point of view—to support the theme.

A Model Analysis

Read the short poem by Siegfried Sassoon, “Base Details”, reprinted in Project Bartleby.

Let’s first review some points from a close-reading of the poem:

  • First, let’s try to determine who the speaker is, the “I” of the poem. Notice that the speaker speculates: “If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath…” Might we assume he is none of the three adjectives? So how old would he be? Start with a hypothesis and stick with it unless further details make your guess seem untenable. Then try a different hypothesis. For now, let’s assume that the speaker is young. What is his rank? Is he an officer? That is unlikely. He is probably an enisted man since his tone toward the majors is angry and sarcastic.
  • He calls them “scarlet.” What is the denotation of “scarlet”? What are some connotations of “scarlet”? What does “petulant” mean? Why are the faces of the majors described as “puffy”? What is the main meaning here of “scrap”? Are other meanings intended?
  • What is the purpose of the poem? Look up the brief biographical details for Sassoon on the online “Oxford World War I Poets” website.

After reading the poem three times, have a look at the following student essay on diction in “Base Details.”

The Diction of “Base Details”(Student Essay adapted from Edward J. Gordon, Writing About Imaginative Literature, Harbrace: 1973).

Old men make and run wars; young men fight and die in them. In “Base Details,” Siegfried Sassoon reveals through his diction a bitterness toward the fact that young men die in wars while the officers live safely behind the lines. The speaker in the poem is an ordinary soldier talking about the majors at the army base. By pretending what he would be like if he were an officer, he condemns war.

Through his choice of words, the soldier expresses an attitude of contempt for the officers behind the lines who “speed glum heroes up the line to death.” He speaks with sarcasm of their fierceness and goes on to describe them as “bald, and short of breath.” If he were a major, he, too, would have a “puffy petulant face,/Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel.” The connotations of these words suggest men who are overweight and out of shape from drinking and eating too much. The reference to “scarlet Majors” recalls the red dress uniforms of British officers and the color of blood.

[Coherence would be even better here if the student could perhaps go on to point out explicitly how the majors figuratively have blood on their hands—the blood of the young soldiers under their command. One brief sentence would do.]

The speaker then goes on to describe the attitude toward soldiers that is held by the officers. One speaks of losing many men in “this last scrap.” The understatement of that last word contrasts sharply with the mention in the same line of a heavy loss in battle. [Here the student should state the other meanings of “scrap” and point out their thematic significance.] In the last two lines of the poem, a further contrast is set up between “youth stone dead” and the officer who will “toddle safely home and die—in bed.” [Here the student could improve the essay by discussing the connotations of the verb “toddle” and then relating the diction to theme.]

When the entire poem is read, the title becomes ambiguous. The apparent meaning refers to the details of a military base. But “base” can also mean low and contemptible. “Detail” also has two meanings. It can mean a detachment of men sent out on a particular mission—”speed glum heroes up the line”—but it can also mean a minor matter, as if sending people off to die is not important to the officers. So the apparent meaning that we see as we begin reading, turns into a second meaning when we finish reading the poem.

The diction, then, makes a comment on the theme of the poem: old men who direct wars at a safe distance behind the lines seem to have little understanding of what it means to die in battle and appear on “the Roll of Honor.”

Works Cited

  • “literature, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2019. Accessed 28 August 2019.
  • “literary, adj. and n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2019. Accessed 28 August 2019.

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