Great essay on the importance of theme in literary fiction. The Big Two-Hearted River is a beautiful, understated story, and worth reading again and again.
My local bookstore puts Chandler in “Mystery and Thriller.” Yet his Marlowe stories have big-time themes, including failure and disappointment. We might not get that from the film adaptations, but it’s written there between the events of the cases, which I have trouble keeping track of anyway: “There was the usual coming and going in the corridor outside my office and when I opened the door and walked into the musty silence of the little waiting room there was the usual feeling of having been dropped down a well dried up twenty years ago to which no one would come back ever.” (The Little Sister)
You would never come across something like that in Agatha Christie, but then that’s not why we read Christie.
In Kafka, the plots are often ridiculous. In “A Country Doctor,” the story is this:
A doctor is called in the middle of a winter night to a distant farmhouse, where he misdiagnoses the patient, a boy, as simply over-caffeinated; once he admits his error (the boy has a hideous wound in his side), “The family is happy; it sees me active; the sister tells it to the mother, the mother to the father, the father to a few guests who are entering the open door through the moonlight on tiptoe, balancing with outstretched arms.” (Appelbaum translation) Then the family and the village elders undress the doctor and place him in bed alongside the boy. The doctor escapes, sort of, still undressed, but his carriage’s horses only poke along: “as slowly as old men we proceeded across the snowy waste.”
But the themes are rich: failure, illness, loss of control, arrogance, frustration, anxiety of all kinds. To me, it almost has the feel of what Freud called an examination dream, written as a single five-page paragraph, thus lending its telling a sense of onrushing inevitability alongside the dream-like absurdity.
The bookstore puts Kafka in “Fiction and Literature” but it seems to me he could easily go into “Sci-fi and Horror.”
Theme vs. plot seems like a false dichotomy. If we want to repeat stereotypes, genre fiction tends to be plot-driven while literary fiction tends to be character-driven. Neither has a monopoly on theme. Both can have heart, depth, and meaning to their stories.
Thx for this post. Theme (I call it STTA--"something to think about"), is one of the criteria I judge my stories by and probably should use to compare them to each other when deciding what to submit. The other is enjoyability, which is much less important in literary fiction. Your analysis of the Hemingway story was really insightful; another one with strong theme and little plot is "Hills Like White Elephants." What an amazing story--the theme and the larger story itself are left untold by the writer and left to be filled in by the reader.
The same--editor changing an ending--happened to me, first published short story. In that case the ending was too ambiguous, not happy enough, and for the audience of a woman's magazine had to be happy. I resurrected the original ending when I published the story as title story of my first book.
As for "Big Two-Hearted River," the author's context is not going to be known to anyone who does not know Hemingway's bio, and a story has to work outside of context. What makes it a great story is for one the level of detail, and I read its theme as American individualism, in which the land itself--the continent--has the powers to make a lone man happy. Civilization has burnt itself out of the wilderness, leaving abundance in the river. Nick has a right to it all, even canned food if he wants it--American entitlement--and he learnt how to make bad coffee from a man who got rich and forgot his friends--the American pioneer. It captures a moment in culture, and that's how its conduit of a character and its episodic plot expresses its theme.
I don’t see “American entitlement” in the story. That’s a political point of view from the current moment applied to a story written almost 100 years ago. Hemingway was more interested in what it meant to be a man, a fisherman, a bullfighter, a lover, etc. than he was in any woke philosophy from 2022.
Yeah, I get that. What it means to be a man--and an American I'd say too--comes across clearly in this story. It's a slice of Americana for me. I didn't mean it politically, though I can see how my comment comes across as political. I'm trying to read it in the context of a future in which it is considered timeless.
Great essay on the importance of theme in literary fiction. The Big Two-Hearted River is a beautiful, understated story, and worth reading again and again.
I agree. In fact, I do read it again and again!
Really appreciated this analysis.
very uplifting to see the emphasis on theme. my stories are often seinfeld-like in that "nothing happens."
My local bookstore puts Chandler in “Mystery and Thriller.” Yet his Marlowe stories have big-time themes, including failure and disappointment. We might not get that from the film adaptations, but it’s written there between the events of the cases, which I have trouble keeping track of anyway: “There was the usual coming and going in the corridor outside my office and when I opened the door and walked into the musty silence of the little waiting room there was the usual feeling of having been dropped down a well dried up twenty years ago to which no one would come back ever.” (The Little Sister)
You would never come across something like that in Agatha Christie, but then that’s not why we read Christie.
In Kafka, the plots are often ridiculous. In “A Country Doctor,” the story is this:
A doctor is called in the middle of a winter night to a distant farmhouse, where he misdiagnoses the patient, a boy, as simply over-caffeinated; once he admits his error (the boy has a hideous wound in his side), “The family is happy; it sees me active; the sister tells it to the mother, the mother to the father, the father to a few guests who are entering the open door through the moonlight on tiptoe, balancing with outstretched arms.” (Appelbaum translation) Then the family and the village elders undress the doctor and place him in bed alongside the boy. The doctor escapes, sort of, still undressed, but his carriage’s horses only poke along: “as slowly as old men we proceeded across the snowy waste.”
But the themes are rich: failure, illness, loss of control, arrogance, frustration, anxiety of all kinds. To me, it almost has the feel of what Freud called an examination dream, written as a single five-page paragraph, thus lending its telling a sense of onrushing inevitability alongside the dream-like absurdity.
The bookstore puts Kafka in “Fiction and Literature” but it seems to me he could easily go into “Sci-fi and Horror.”
Theme vs. plot seems like a false dichotomy. If we want to repeat stereotypes, genre fiction tends to be plot-driven while literary fiction tends to be character-driven. Neither has a monopoly on theme. Both can have heart, depth, and meaning to their stories.
Anything is a false dichotomy if you analyze it enough! It's just a helpful distinction to draw to light different ways stories can be written.
Thx for this post. Theme (I call it STTA--"something to think about"), is one of the criteria I judge my stories by and probably should use to compare them to each other when deciding what to submit. The other is enjoyability, which is much less important in literary fiction. Your analysis of the Hemingway story was really insightful; another one with strong theme and little plot is "Hills Like White Elephants." What an amazing story--the theme and the larger story itself are left untold by the writer and left to be filled in by the reader.
The same--editor changing an ending--happened to me, first published short story. In that case the ending was too ambiguous, not happy enough, and for the audience of a woman's magazine had to be happy. I resurrected the original ending when I published the story as title story of my first book.
As for "Big Two-Hearted River," the author's context is not going to be known to anyone who does not know Hemingway's bio, and a story has to work outside of context. What makes it a great story is for one the level of detail, and I read its theme as American individualism, in which the land itself--the continent--has the powers to make a lone man happy. Civilization has burnt itself out of the wilderness, leaving abundance in the river. Nick has a right to it all, even canned food if he wants it--American entitlement--and he learnt how to make bad coffee from a man who got rich and forgot his friends--the American pioneer. It captures a moment in culture, and that's how its conduit of a character and its episodic plot expresses its theme.
I don’t see “American entitlement” in the story. That’s a political point of view from the current moment applied to a story written almost 100 years ago. Hemingway was more interested in what it meant to be a man, a fisherman, a bullfighter, a lover, etc. than he was in any woke philosophy from 2022.
Yeah, I get that. What it means to be a man--and an American I'd say too--comes across clearly in this story. It's a slice of Americana for me. I didn't mean it politically, though I can see how my comment comes across as political. I'm trying to read it in the context of a future in which it is considered timeless.