Literary Analysis - Explain the Evidence

Question 1

goal of explaining evidence

Answer 1

• to connect everything together, leading to theme, since in literature “all roads lead to theme.”

Question 2

explain the evidence

Answer 2

• After we have presented our evidence – the textual data that supports the topic sentence of our body paragraph, which supports the thesis of our essay – we must explain the evidence. We must explicitly interpret it for our reader, and we must do so with theme in mind.
• NOTE: Be sure not to omit this step. If we can see the elements the author is using but don’t know what the purpose is, we have just dissected the story without learning what the parts do, without seeing the big picture.
• NOTE: In literary analysis we find and pull out individual pieces of the literature we are examining. It is our explanation that puts it all together in a way that makes sense and illuminates the big purpose, the theme.