5.2–Writing About Novels

Remember, a novel is long, so literary scholars can’t write about the whole thing in one essay. Therefore, generally, when we write about novels, we select one aspect of it that we think is important and focus on that. Keeping a realistic scope is essential when it comes to writing about novels. An essay with an overly broad scope will be far too long and won’t say anything very helpful. However, an essay that zeroes in on one specific and well-defined topic provides a focused analysis about a single part that can give readers insight into the whole. For example, a literary analysis that tries to answer a question like, “What is this novel saying about women?” will be too broad, but a smaller topic like, “Why are so many of the women characters in this novel teachers?” has a more realistic scope. Furthermore, in the process of answering this smaller question, you may well find an important part of the answer to the larger one.

A great place to start in your literary analysis is to take a closer look at something about the novel that puzzles you and ask “Why did the author write it that way?” Assume the writer knew what they were doing. So, for example, if you read Jane Eyre and notice that Jane does a lot of painting, ask yourself, “Why did Charlotte Brontë portray Jane as a painter?” Perhaps Bronte wanted to show that Jane has a big imagination and deep feelings, even though the circumstances she’s found herself in have always been rather limited. Alternatively, maybe she wanted to connect the images Jane draws and paints to things she dreams or books she has read as a way to foreshadow events that may come later. As you analyze the passages in the novel that talk about painting, you might try to figure out if the story refers to any famous pictures, if the things Jane paints seem to have some relationship to the events of the story, or if they might have symbolic meanings. As you explore, you’ll gather evidence from which you can then draw a larger conclusion.

Additionally, whatever you choose to write about should have implications for some larger statement you think the author is trying to make. Novels are so long and multifaceted that there are virtually always multiple statements and main messages, so you get to pick which one is the most interesting to you. A key term literary critics use when discussing this is the word theme. In a novel, a theme is a topic the author is examining or a recurring pattern that runs throughout. In Kamala, some themes could include, “dysfunctional families,” “nature” or “the demands of tradition,” and we can tell these are themes because there are a lot of different examples of characters, language, and scenes centered on them. The book could be interpreted as making a statement about these ideas: for example, you could say that Kamala is telling readers something about what causes Indian families to be dysfunctional, or about how natures serves as a mental stimulant and escape for intelligent women who are being denied education, or about what people’s moral and ethical duties are to either challenge or uphold their culture’s traditions.

When you’ve settled on a theme you’d like to explore, the next step is to hunt for evidence to help you make a larger claim about that theme. There are many different avenues for you to explore, and a good place to start is the basic questions: What is the author’s name and who are they? Who is the intended audience? When was the book written? If the novel was written a long time ago, you may need to know some historical context, or information about the time period, to get the most out of this story. Prepare to look up words that you aren’t familiar with in the dictionary or to Google people and events the story refers to that you haven’t heard of before. Jane Eyre and Kamala were both written more than a hundred years ago, so the discussion questions and activities included in this chapter offer some helpful historical context to guide you.

Since complex characters are one of the defining qualities of a novel, you will likely find answers to your questions by analyzing the characters. You might begin with first impressions. Do you like them? Do you want them to succeed? From there, look deeper. Often the characters who make the strongest impact on us are those with realistic personalities that we can relate to. These are called round characters because they seem three dimensional, like they could stand up off the page and talk to you. The protagonists of most novels are round characters because one thing that makes a novel a novel is the complex inner lives of its characters. By contrast, a flat character is more like a caricature than a real person. Their motivations are simplistic, exaggerated, or based on stereotypes. Sometimes, readers criticize novels that feature flat characters, but before you write them off too quickly, consider that flat characters can serve important purposes. They can be used to provide comic relief or to paint an unflattering portrait of a type of person or a set of views that the author disapproves of. Alternatively, a story with flat characters may be trying to communicate that the most important thing about the story is not the characters at all, but something else, such as the larger events that take place around them, the setting, or someone who is not present. A good example of some flat characters would be Mr. Buffy, Mr. Cuffy, and Mr. Duffy from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. As their names suggest, these characters are intended to be so shallow and insubstantial as people that they’re virtually interchangeable, which is Dickens’s way of making fun of them and using them for comic relief. However, they also serve as a recurring background reminder of the prosperous and apathetic people who see the problems of poverty Dickens writes about but do nothing to help.

Another way to analyze a character is to examine how much they change. A dynamic character is a character who changes substantially over the course of the story. An example of a dynamic character would be Kathy from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Over the course of the novel, Kathy learns to have stable relationships: at first, she is too absorbed in trying to win the approval of a manipulative friend. Then, she overcompensates by angrily cutting that friend off. Finally, she learns how to accept and value her relationships for what they are without internalizing others’ opinions of her or having unrealistic expectations. Meanwhile, a static character is basically the same at the end as they were at the beginning. Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice is a static character because he learns nothing from his failed proposals to Elizabeth Bennet. Novels have a lot more space to explore the ways characters change over time than other types of fiction. In fact, there’s a whole genre of novel devoted to this, called the bildungsroman (German for a “novel of education”) that explores how a person grows from a child into an adult. Jane Eyre and Kamala are both examples of bildungsromane.

Here are some additional questions to help you come up with ideas for how to analyze your chosen topic:

• What kind of diction or language does the author use to tell their story? Is it intentionally beautiful or poetic language? Is it utilitarian get-the-point-across language? Is it chatty, as if the speaker were talking casually with you? Is it funny? Do you need to look up words in the dictionary to understand it?
• Does the author use literary allusions or references to an outside book or story that you might have heard of before?
• Can you identify some objects, images, or events in the story that might be symbolic or that could be metaphors for other things in the story?
• What’s the pacing like? Is this a fast-paced novel that keeps you on the edge of your seat, or does the author halt the story so they can take time to describe scenery, what people and things look like, or the inner thoughts of its protagonists? Most novels are fast-paced sometimes and slow-paced other times, so try to figure out why.
• Does the author use “special effects” like flashbacks, dream sequences, footnotes, or other types of text that stick out from the normal paragraph structure?^[1]

In your essay, try to put the things you’ve noticed together to make your claim.

Note that you don’t have to agree with the author. In fact, you may find some of the things they say objectionable. One important type of literary analysis is the critique, in which you can explore the things about the book that you think are wrong. For example, many literary scholars have critiqued the way Brontë portrays Bertha Mason because Bertha is described as a Creole from Jamaica, and Brontë withholds compassion from her, makes her seem like a monster, and draws on racist stereotypes. Similarly, one could critique Satthianadhan for advocating so strongly for women’s education, but then portraying Sai, the only truly independent female character, as an amoral person. However, you don’t have to critique if you don’t want to. You can also focus on trying to understand the things about the text that interest you, unpacking messages the novel sends that you think are important, or discussing how the novel interacts with the historical context provided for you in the discussion questions or in your own research. Most importantly, have fun with it, and prepare to learn something interesting.

Finally, try to come to the text with an open mind, and be prepared to change your view if your initial assumptions don’t prove to be correct. Literary analysis isn’t the same as scientific inquiry, but like a scientist, you should still plan to gather data before you decide what your argument is. There aren’t firm right or wrong answers to the questions literary analyses ask. Instead, the best literary analyses are not the “right” ones, but the most persuasive ones, the ones that do the best job of convincing you that their point of view is correct by referencing quotes from the text as evidence and drawing logical conclusions from that evidence in a way that readers can follow.