Theme examples: 40 theme statements from stories, fables and novels

Della sells her long hair to buy a chain for Jim's gold watch. Jim sells the watch to buy combs for her hair. Both gifts are useless by Christmas morning.

Theme statement: Love is measured by what we give up for each other, not by what our gifts can do.

The narrator calls the two foolish and then, in the last lines, the wisest of all who give gifts. The irony is the argument: the gifts fail, and the giving succeeds.

Mathilde Loisel borrows a diamond necklace for a ball, loses it, and spends ten years in poverty paying for a replacement. Then she learns the original was paste.

Theme statement: Vanity and the fear of being seen as poor can cost far more than the truth would have.

Evidence. Before the ball, fretting that she has no jewels, Mathilde says: “No; there's nothing more humiliating than to look poor among other women who are rich.” At the end, the price of hiding the loss is set beside the truth: the replacement costs thirty-six thousand francs, and the original “was worth at most only five hundred francs!” The first line gives the motive; the last gives the cost.

A second reading. It was her husband who proposed the lie about a broken clasp, and the narrator's own comment is about chance, not vanity: “How small a thing is needed to make or ruin us!” Read that way, the theme is closer to a life can be made or ruined by an accident, and the ten years of work, in which, the narrator says, she “bore her part, however, with sudden heroism,” show a strength her comfortable life never tested. Both readings fit the ending. An essay would have to argue for one.

A narrator who insists he is sane murders an old man who has “the eye of a vulture,” hides the body under the floor, and confesses to the police because he hears the dead man's heart still beating.

Theme statement: Guilt cannot be buried; the mind that commits a crime becomes its own witness.

The police suspect nothing. The only force that brings the narrator down is inside him, which is why the theme needs an unreliable narrator.

Told that her husband died in a railroad accident, Louise Mallard sits alone and feels, under the grief, the word “free.” An hour later he walks in alive, and she dies. The doctors call it “joy that kills.”

Theme statement: A marriage can be a quiet prison even when no one in it is cruel.

The doctors' diagnosis is the last irony: the people around Louise read her death as love, and the reader knows it was loss.

A Confederate sympathizer is hanged from a bridge by Union soldiers. The rope seems to break, and he escapes downstream and runs home to his wife. Then the last paragraph returns to the bridge.

Theme statement: The mind clings hardest to hope at the moment hope is gone.

The escape takes most of the story and lasts a second of real time. The structure is the theme: the reader believes in the escape the way the dying man does.

A young Puritan leaves his wife, Faith, for one night in the forest, where he seems to see the whole town, Faith included, at a witches' meeting. He goes home and lives out his life as “a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man.”

Theme statement: Believing that everyone else is secretly wicked can ruin a life as surely as sin.

Hawthorne never says whether the meeting was real. The damage is real either way, which is the point.

Johnsy, sick with pneumonia, decides she will die when the last leaf falls from the vine outside her window. The leaf survives a night of storm. Later she learns the old painter downstairs painted it on the wall that night, and died of pneumonia himself.

Theme statement: One act of sacrifice can give another person the will to live.

The painter talked for years about the masterpiece he would one day paint. The ending reveals that he did, and that it was a single leaf.

A princess's lover must open one of two doors: behind one waits a tiger, behind the other a woman he will have to marry. The princess knows which is which and signals to the right. The story ends before the door opens.

Theme statement: Love and jealousy can pull with equal force, and the reader is left to decide which wins.

A story can make its theme a question. Stockton gives the reader everything needed to argue both answers and nothing to settle it.

The rain had started again by the time Ruth got the ladder against the house. Seventy-one, and she could still do this. Her son's number was on the fridge under a magnet shaped like Ohio, where it had been since March.

“Mrs. Okafor?” The neighbor's girl stood on the sidewalk in a hood, holding a bag of groceries. “Do you want me to hold that?”

“I've been cleaning this gutter since before your mother was born.” Ruth climbed two rungs. Leaves, black and heavy, came away in her glove.

On the fourth rung the ladder's left foot slid an inch in the mud. Ruth stopped. Her knuckles had gone white on the rail. She looked down at the girl, who hadn't moved.

“Put the bag down,” Ruth said. “Hold it from the side, not the front. My husband always stood on the side.”

The girl set the groceries on the step. Her hands closed around the rails, and the ladder stopped moving.