A theme is a broad idea, message, or moral of a story. The message may be about life, society, or human nature. Themes often explore timeless and universal ideas and are almost always implied rather than stated explicitly. Along with plot, character, setting, and style, theme is considered one of the fundamental components of fiction.[1] Another approach to literature stresses that idea, message, and moral are abstractions and that fiction makes the idea concrete through action. In this view many themes exist in any given story but that what gives a story unity is one action of the human condition that is rendered through the various actions of the characters in the story.
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Various techniques may be used to express many more themes.
Leitwortstil is the purposeful saying of words throughout a literary piece that usually expresses a motif or theme important to the story. This device dates back to the One Thousand and One Nights, also known as the Arabian Nights, which connects several tales together in a story cycle. The storytellers of the tales relied on this technique "to shape the constituent members of their story cycles into a coherent whole."[2] This technique is also used frequently in Hebrew narratives.[3]
Thematic patterning is "the distribution of recurrent thematic concepts and moralistic motifs among the various incidents and frames of a story. Thematic patterning may be arranged so as to emphasize the unifying argument or salient idea which disparate events and disparate frames have in common". This technique also dates back to the One Thousand and One Nights.[2]
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