Write a 5-paragraph essay explaining your interpretation of a given shory story(choose one), using those 3 pieces of evidence as support. select either Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" or Ray Brad

How does a thesis or argument work in an essay about literature?

First, notice that in an interpretive literary essay, you don’t usually take one clear side of a yes/no or right/wrong debate. You don’t have to argue that your interpretation of a work is the only interpretation of that work.

Also, you aren’t writing a pro/con essay where you summarize existing research on an issue and take a side: like you might be pro early childhood education, or pro standardized testing, for example. In a literary analysis, even if you do some research, you aren’t likely just summarizing what others have said about a work or idea.

This can leave a lot of students feeling like, if there’s no really “right” answer, does that mean you can just say anything? No wrong answers!?

Well, for most college-level literary essays, you’ll have to eventually support your assertions with quotations from the text. So yeah, you could claim that Hamlet is actually from outer space (that’d explain a lot of the strange behavior) - but what part of the play would you quote from to prove that?

By the same token, just because an assertion can be backed up with a quotation, doesn’t make that assertion automatically a great thesis.

For example, you wouldn’t just want to make the blanket statement that in Hamlet, Shakespeare uses symbolism. Sure, you could quote from all over the play to prove the point. But it’s a point that doesn’t really need proving. No reasonable reader is likely to argue the opposite - like, that Shakespeare doesn’t use symbolism.

So this is what can make the thesis statement, or argument, in an essay about literature a bit tricky: you can’t just make a random assertion or claim an idea is your opinion and since all art is subjective…. You don’t want to offer an interpretation that’s too obvious, either - like Shakespeare using symbolism. This won’t likely to be news to anyone.

A useful rule of thumb is that a good literary thesis, in most writing situations, will make an informed reader say something like “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that before.”

They’re intrigued by your interpretation because it isn’t just an un-proveable, subjective opinion. Nor is it an overly obvious statement of fact about a work. It’s an interesting idea about an important aspect of a literary work that you can support with details from the text. It’ll make your reader see the work in a new way - which is great!