Often confused with one another, motif and theme are related but not the same. Read on to explore how so and how to analyse motifs.
The picture above visually encapsulates what a motif means: A repeated pattern. The circular shape above is used repeatedly throughout the picture, albeit in different colours.
Motifs in literary texts are essentially repeated patterns of language, sounds, images, symbols, and/or concepts.
As with the picture above, these repetitions are not always the same. There can be minor alterations to them. In the case of the picture above, the colours of these repeated shapes are not congruent.
What then is the relationship or difference between motif and theme? Why are motifs significant?
A literary theme is the main idea or underlying meaning a writer explores in a novel, short story, or other literary work.
So, consider a motif as a vehicle that carries and reinforces the themes of the literary work. Or, consider motifs as little pieces of puzzles that are pieced together; contributing to a bigger, holistic picture.
Often, due to the repetitive nature of motifs, they also alert the reader to draw connections and/or to make comparisons between scenes and words; to notice the different contexts in which a specific motif is used.
Example 1: Cars in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Throughout the novel, references to cars are closely associated with restlessness, carelessness and also with power in all its manifestations, and finally with death. Cars in the Jazz Age, which the novel is set in, are the new emblem of consumer power yet misshaped to become conduits of careless destruction and violence in modern society.
Cars are seen as constructions of luxury and romance, as seen when a penniless Gatsby stumbles upon Daisy's house, which becomes a centre of romance and mysterious allure, as seen in the zeugma,"redolent of this year's motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered". It is also the cradle of Gatsby and Daisy's romance five years ago, "It wasn’t until then that I connected this Gatsby with the officer in her white car.” This reeks of irony, given their extramarital affair five years later ends with a tragic car accident.
Yet, it is in considering Jordan Baker's wilful carelessness (whose name is a deliberate amalgam of two American makes of the 1920s), that the car becomes a manifestation for the sheer apathy to other people that characterises the aristocratic class (Tom, Daisy and Jordan) and other such "careless people" who are insulated by, and by extension, purchase immunity with their wealth. Jordan, in one instance, drives so close to a workman that the fender "flicked a button" on his coat. This close shave, however, is no more a harbinger for the more morbid and disastrous events to come in other parts of the novel. Jordan does no more than flick the workman's coat, but elsewhere, cars "rip" and destroy: Mrs Ulysses Swett's "automobile [runs] over [the] right hand” of a drunkard on Gatsby's driveway, Tom has an affair with the hotel chambermaid in Santa Barbara and injures her when he“ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night, and ripped a front wheel off his car. The girl who was with him got into the papers, too, because her arm was broken.” The most disturbing of accidents involving cars is that of Daisy's manslaughter of Myrtle Wilson, whose female identity is violated and utterly ravaged, or even symbolically raped, "her left breast was swinging loose like a flap, and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath."
Example 2: Wetness/Water vs Dryness and Warm vs Cold in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
In general, the numerous dichotomies/oppositions in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which establish the mechanisms of Stephen's associative mind in make meaning to his experiences. In tracing these dichotomies, the reader is enabled to better understand his emotions and states of mind. One such opposition is that of wetness and dryness, and of warm and cold.
Warmth is often associated with comfort for Stephen, "It would be lovely in bed after the sheets got a bit hot. First they were so cold to get into. He shivered to think how cold they were at first. But then they got hot and then he could sleep.(my italics)", and even maternal love and safety as seen in the warm fireplace at home where he can enjoy reading with mother at his side,"Mother was sitting at the fire with Dante waiting for Brigid to bring in the tea. She has her feet on the fender and her jewelly slippers were so hot and they had such a lovely warm smell. (my italics)".
In contrast, coldness is often associated with discomfort and avoided. When Stephen feels fear or displeasure, his corporeal self experiences an imagined drop in temperature, as seen when others chatter about punishment by the pandybat, he feels shivery and cold.
Yet, warmth and cold often occur in close proximity: Stephen often feels cold in association with warmth, and vice versa. His worst experience with cold is the incident with Wells as he is shouldered into the "square ditch" where he realises,"How could and slimy the water had been!" is quickly contrasted with warm image of his mother "sitting at the fire". As such, Stephen's consciousness, the world is divided into two, the warm, lovely world where his mother is present and the cold dirty world in her chilling absence.
Another set of oppositions is also prominent in the novel: wetness and dryness.As a child, when Stephen wets his bed, it is immediately replaced with a dry "oilsheet", as though conditioning him to become averse to wetness. It is thus understandable that his deepest moments of guilt are described with wetness or water. Due to his patronage of prostitutes, he suffers, "His sins trickled from his lips one by one, trickled in shameful drops from his soul festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice. The last sins oozed forth, sluggish, filthy. (my italics)". Through the use of a metaphor, Stephen's vice is compared to a stream, connoting the uncontrollable and expansive magnitude of his sins and thus, articulating his extreme sense of guilt. This guilt is further enhanced with the language of sickness, "his soul festering", and the simile comparing his soul to an infected, pus-filled sore. Taken together, they evoke a sense of disgust within the reader, which mirrors Stephen's visceral disgust at himself.
Example 3: Light and Darkness in "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin
One of the most striking patterns in the "Sonny's Blues" is that of darkness and light. In fact, light and darkness are in constant tension throughout the short story, through which Baldwin uses it to symbolise the constant battle between good (salvation, grace and morality) and evil (the social and personal demons, Sonny's drug addiction).
Let us examine the very first paragraph of the story, where the unnamed narrator is staring at a newspaper story about his brother's arrest, "I stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside." There is an immediate, noticeable contrast and tension between darkness and light: The darkness is hostile and its intimidating presence is difficult or impossible to ignore; its strength is foregrounded with the loud aural imagery (it is also a synaesthesia as there is a conflation of two senses: sight and sound), "roared outside", as if it looms outside, ready to extinguish the light within the subway carriage.
Recap: Motifs are vehicles of the literary texts' themes.
Think of yourself as a detective following the trails of clues that lead you to the holistic understanding of the text's themes. Have fun unpacking your texts!
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