How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

Following up on the previous chapter, Foster writes, “[t]he further truth is that even when they write about sex, they’re really writing about something else” (152). John Fowles, for example, has a famous sex scene in his novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman that speaks to novel’s themes of individualism and freedom from conformity. Two other novels famous (or infamous) for their sexual content are Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Each, Foster argues, uses sex more as a vehicle to explore other themes. 

In Chapter 18, the author examines the meaning of a character’s submersion in water. As the chapter title indicates, when a character survives being underwater, the submersion may symbolize a kind of baptism. Religious baptism is a kind of cleansing and rebirth; when characters fall into water, it may be an indication that a baptism is taking place. In Ordinary People by Judith Guest, two brothers go sailing and one drowns. The surviving brother appears to have limited life potential; his drowned sibling, on the other hand, was the golden boy. The brother who lives has to cope with survivor’s guilt as well as everyone’s low expectations for him. However, he is now out of his brother’s shadow: in other words, he is reborn. 

Geography covers a wide range of topics, as Foster explains: it’s “setting, but it’s also (or can be) psychology, attitude, finance, industry—anything that place can forge in the people who live there” (174). Sometimes setting dominates a story so much that it couldn’t be written in any other place, such as in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In other works, setting can virtually be a character of its own. The author describes this use of setting in Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam novel Going After Cacciato. Traditionally in Western literature, the southern climates have been depicted as more open, freer, and even libertine when compared to the north. Thus, Foster writes, “when writers send characters south, it’s so they can run amok” (179).

Similar to weather, written about in Chapter 9, seasons represent various meanings in stories. Spring connotes new life or rebirth, for instance, while autumn suggests the golden years in one’s life. This symbolism is so ingrained in our way of thinking that they are ripe for irony, or upending expectations. Spring, for example, can also bring drenching rains, floods, and death—the opposite of its usual meaning. Eliot uses spring ironically in his poem “The Wasteland,” which opens with this line: “April is the cruellest month” (191).

In this second Interlude, Foster pauses to emphasize something he mentioned earlier, that there is only one story that encompasses all of human activity. This story is hard to define because it’s so large and inclusive, but Foster believes the story is about “ourselves, about what it means to be human” (194). In that sense, there is nothing that has not already been written about, and writers need to look for new angles to age-old topics. Likewise, characters often resemble other characters that appear in great literature. This endless set of connections is known as “intertextuality.” A similar notion is that of “archetypes,” (see both terms in Index of Terms) taken from psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s theories. Characters fall into patterns of behavior that repeat in literature, starting with the earliest myths.