As any English major can tell you, the study of literature is all about figuring out what the author of a given was trying to say. The premier tool for figuring that out is literary analysis, and this how-to will explain the ins and outs of this confusing and sometimes painful endeavor.

Sometimes it is a mistake to try to analyze an entire book all at once. After all, you only have a limited amount of time and space to work with, but the author of the book almost certainly had more of both and definitely had the advantage of access to his or her own mind.

When you are writing a literary analysis, think of yourself as a detective: you have a bunch of clues that the author has left you (the book) and you are trying to figure out what was inside the author's mind while writing the book. So, it is wise to zero in on one particular aspect of a book: what does it say about lovec How does character X represent the fractured state of modern manc Why did the author bother to write the book at allc These are the sort of questions that you are trying to answer.

Luckily, your detective's toolbox has some handy gadgets that will help you answer these questions. These gadgets are words like theme, motif, simile, and metaphor. In order to write a literary analysis, you will need to understand them. The theme is the underlying point of a book, the thing that it is about. It is related to a moral, but it is a little bit different.

A theme is likely to be an abstract, such as love or courage. A moral, on the other hand, would be a statement such as "Early to be and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise." A motif is a recurring element of the work that helps to illustrate the theme. A motif might be something like a butterfly that shows up every few chapters, or something that the characters keep saying. A simile is saying that something is like something else, and a metaphor is something that represents something else.

When writing your literary analysis, illustrate your points with examples from the text. You need to provide support for the things that you say, but you can be comforted by the fact that all of literary analysis is somewhat subjective. Two people can look at the same sentence and see two completely different meanings, and your job is convincing the reader that your interpretation is the best one.