Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace
What all good short papers for this seminar have to do: Your paper must have a thesis. A thesis is a central claim you’re making. Thus these little papers are basically argumentative. Your paper consists of asserting, explaining, and supporting your thesis. Your thesis always has to do with a story’s theme or meaning. Your thesis could be that a given chapter in War and Peace has some basic theme or meaning Z. Or that the symbolism of the Andrei’s oak tree plays such and such a role in getting across this theme Z or A or such.
No matter what you do, it’s impossible to avoid having to make CLAIMS about themes and meanings. And your claim must be interesting. Something I have not thought of. Asserting a claim that Natasha is beloved because she’s beautiful might not be wrong, but it’s so boring that nobody’s going to want to read your paper, least of all me. And no one is going to be persuaded by it, since it’s self-obvious. Aim to persuade with argument and evidence.
The trick to coming up with a good thesis is that you have to find some middle ground between a wacko thesis that you can’t defend (Pierre is actually a zombie) and a boring one that doesn’t have anything in it to argue about.
There are three ways to support your thesis, and to a certain degree, you’ll need all of them. The first is “reading” various parts of the story and interpreting them in such a way that they seem to indicate that your thesis is sound. The second is by showing that your thesis, your personal way of understanding the story, makes the rest of the story make sense. It “gets its arms around” the bulk of the story so far. The third is to anticipate and disarm any obvious objections to your thesis.
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