Short Story Theme Essay

Theme is a message or underlying meaning of a story, that the author is trying to portray to the reader. the class read three short stories the common theme is “society should not dictate the ethical path one takes in life”. Three stories with this theme are, Two Kinds (By Amy Tan), The Endless Street Car Ride Into The Night, and the Tinfoil Noose (By Jean Shepard), and Summer is Gone (By Susie Kretschmer). Though, while analyzing the themes (from all of the stories) there were two, that rather than relating to each other had opposing themes. These two stories, were Two Kinds and The Endless Street Car Ride Into The Night, and the Tinfoil Noose The story Two kinds has only two really obvious underlying messages, but they have a lot of impact.

In Two Kinds a major theme in the story is “A person is not just one thing”, but in the story The Endless Streetcar Ride into the Night, and the Tinfoil Noose, a major theme is “In life people fall into two categories spectators or main attractions”. Even though both of these themes conflict, it does not mean that one of them is untrue. The first theme is true, because people are not made up of just one thing, there are multiple aspects of a person’s personality that makes them who they are. The second theme is true, because humanity has the tendency to separate into groups of people rather than everyone singing Kumbaya under one roof. It all depends on a person’s actions, they can choose to do something and change their social standing or the way they live, or they are able to stay where the category they were already assigned by society. In the story Two Kinds, the main character chooses that she would not be labeled or put into a group by the set of rules and expectations given to her. In the story The Endless Streetcar Ride into the Night, and the Tinfoil Noose, the main character allowed the label he was given by someone way him down and change how he felt about