night literary analysis essay

Introduction of Night

Summary of night, major themes in night, major characters in night, writing style of night, analysis of literary devices in night  , related posts:, post navigation.

By Elie Wiesel

'Night' by Elie is an important memoir of the Holocaust, depicting the horrors and truth of Germany's treatment of European Jews.

About the Book

Article written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

The novel is an important historical memoir published in 1960 . It was not until the trial and execution of Adolf Eichman in 1961, a year after the novel was finally published, that it came fully into the public spotlight.

Key Facts about Night

• Title:   Night
• When/where written : 1955-1958, South America and France
• Published: 1960
• Genre:  Memoir/Semi-fictional autobiography
• Point-of-View: First-person
• Setting: Europe during WWII
• Climax:  the death of Eliezer’s father, Shlomo
• Antagonist:  The SS soldiers and broader anti-Jewish laws and sentiment.

Elie Wiesel and  Night

Unlike some novels that are written at a distance,  Night  is tied up with the author’s life in an intimate, unignorable way. Wiesel has spoken about  Night  as his account of what happened in the concentration camps , one that is set back only slightly from reality through the creation of Eliezer and a few changes of events and circumstances. The novel is brutally honest, and clear. Wiesel spends its brief 100 pages depicting the lead up to the ghettos, trains, and camps, the loss of his family members, including his mother and sister, and then later his father as well, his suffering (and the suffering he observed) and finally his liberation.  Night  is incredibly personal , so much so that its language only gives the reader so much access to a time in Wiesel’s life that anyone would want to forget, but which he knew was too important to keep in his past. The novel was written several years after WWII, from the perspective of a thirty-year-old man, looking back on himself as a young adult. The climax of the novel connects intimately to one of the most important but often overlooked themes in  Night,  that of father/son relationships. Or, more specifically, sons and their treatment of their fathers. When Eliezer’s father, Shlomo, dies, and Eliezer experiences freedom from the burden of his father’s care, Wiesel represents the true breadth of the changes he’d undergone in the camps and the desperate state to which he and others were existing in.

Books Related to Night

The lasting impact of  night .

Today,  Night is commonly considered to be one of the best personal accounts of the Holocaust ever written . It is read in middle schools, high schools, and universities around the world, providing students with an insight into the horrors of the Second World War as they were experienced by someone close to their own age. It is one of the first ways that young people learn about the Holocaust.  Night  is also credited with helping to preserve the story of the Holocaust, something that Wiesel was incredibly passionate about. When speaking about the story of his life and the lives of millions of others who died, lost their families, homes, and identities during the war, he said that it would be “ not only dangerous but offensive ” to forget them.

Night Review ⭐

Night themes and analysis, night quotes , night historical context , night character list , night summary , about emma baldwin.

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Home Essay Samples Literature The Night

"Night" by Elie Wiesel: A Literary Analysis of the Memoir

Table of contents, narrative techniques and symbolism, loss of innocence and identity, the triumph of memory, legacy and enduring significance.

• Wiesel, Elie. (2006). Night. Hill and Wang.
• LaCapra, D. (2001). Writing history, writing trauma. JHU Press.
• Felman, S., & Laub, D. (1992). Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. Routledge.
• Levi, P. (1988). The drowned and the saved. Vintage.
• Santayana, G. (1905). The Life of Reason. Scribner's.

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Home — Essay Samples — History — Holocaust — Night By Elie Wiesel: An Analysis of Surviving at All Costs

Night by Elie Wiesel: an Analysis of Surviving at All Costs

• Categories: Elie Wiesel Holocaust

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Published: Mar 8, 2024

Words: 740 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

At the heart of Night

One of the most striking themes of night.

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A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

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Summary and Study Guide

Night , by Elie Wiesel, is a memoir recounting the author’s experience in the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz, Gleiwitz, and Buchenwald during the last two years of World War II. The book was published in France in 1958; a shortened English translation was published in the United States in 1960.

In 1944, the 15-year old Wiesel, his father, mother, and sisters were deported from the village of Sighet in Hungary and interned at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland. Eliezer/Elie was the only member of the family to survive the Holocaust. He moved to Paris after the war, where he began to write an account of his experience in the camps in Yiddish. While ostensibly a memoir, Night is also a literary work of art and some critics have cautioned that its biographical factuality remains difficult to determine. Reviewers have variously categorized the book as a semi-fictional memoir, an autobiographical novel, or a non-fictional novel. The book’s publication was a watershed moment in Holocaust literature, and it has been translated into thirty languages.

In the village of Sighet in Transylvania, then part of Hungary, 12-year old Elie Wiesel is absorbed in studying Jewish law and theological philosophy. The only son of orthodox Jewish parents, Eliezer studies the Cabbala, a text of esoteric Jewish wisdom, with Moché the Beadle , the custodian of a local synagogue. Moché is expelled from Sighet along with other foreign Jews, but returns to the village a few months later, claiming to have escaped a mass killing of the deported Jews by the Gestapo. The villagers ignore Moché’s warnings as insane ramblings. After the Nazis occupy Hungary in the spring of 1944, the Jews of Sighet suffer mounting persecution and are eventually moved into ghettoes. Within a few weeks, the ghettoes are shuttered, and the Jews are deported by train. Eliezer’s family is among the last group to be deported.

The deportees travel in intolerable conditions aboard cattle cars for several days, crossing the Hungarian border into Poland, where the train comes under the authority of the German army. A German officer orders the passengers to surrender any gold, silver, or watches they still possess, and an announcement is made that if anyone attempts to escape the train, all its occupants will be shot.

A few days into the journey, Madame Schächter , a middle-aged deportee with a young son, begins to scream, pointing at what she says is a terrible fire outside the window of the train. Nobody else can see the fire. Other deportees attempt to console Madame Schächter, but she continues to scream. Close to hysteria themselves and unable to bear her shrieking, several young men bind and gag her. Escaping her restraints, they beat her forcefully until she is silent, encouraged by the other passengers. As the train arrives at Birkenau, the reception center for Auschwitz, the passengers see flames leaping from chimneys and a vile smell fills the air.

The deportees are violently forced off the train and accosted by prisoner guards. They are then immediately separated according by gender; without knowing it, this is the last time Eliezer will ever see his mother and sisters. An inmate of the camp berates the bewildered deportees, telling them that Auschwitz is a death camp where many will be exterminated. All the men are then separated according to whether they appear fit for work. Eliezer and his father are placed in the same group, but they are unsure whether or not they are considered able-bodied men.

The group is herded toward a flaming pit where children’s bodies are being burned. Many of the deportees begin to weep, and someone begins to recite the Kaddish , the Jewish prayer for the dead. Believing they are about to be massacred, Eliezer considers running to the electric fence, preferring to die by a bullet than in a fiery mass grave. A few steps from the pit, however, the group is ordered to turn toward the barracks. The horror of the experience burns itself indelibly in Eliezer’s mind. That night , he later reflects, murdered his God and his soul, and turned his dreams into ashes.

In the barracks, the new inmates are stripped, shaved, and soaked in disinfectant while being beaten by the Kapos , the head prisoners in charge. Prisoner identification numbers are tattooed on new prisoners’ arms. After three weeks, Eliezer and his father are moved to the work camp, Buna, along with other unskilled laborers. They are assigned to work in an electrical parts warehouse, supervised by the violently unstable Kapo , Idek . One day, Idek brutally attacks Eliezer without provocation. A French girl who works alongside Eliezer comforts him and advises him to keep his anger for another day. Later, Idek falls into another violent rage, beating Eliezer’s father with an iron bar while the boy watches helplessly. Eliezer recalls uncomfortably that if he felt any anger on that occasion, it was not toward Idek, but toward his father, who was unable to avoid Idek’s wrath.

The Nazis execute a number of prisoners for various infractions. The most distressing of these executions is the hanging of a young, beautiful boy, whose neck is not broken by the fall from the gallows. Forced to watch his agonizing death, Eliezer feels that his God, too, has died upon the rope. As the Jewish prisoners celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, Eliezer inwardly rages at God for failing to intervene in the Nazi atrocities committed against the Jews at Auschwitz and other death camps. Though reduced to ashes himself, he feels stronger than the silent and absent God he accuses of betraying His people.

Shortly after Rosh Hashanah, the SS orders a selection of the prisoners, separating those too weak for work from those healthy enough to continue. The weak are exterminated and cremated; the rest are allowed to live. With great relief, Eliezer learns that both he and his father pass the test. However, Eliezer’s father didn’t notice that his number had been recorded, and he is called to a second selection. Fearing he will shortly die, he gives Eliezer his knife and spoon—the only inheritance he has to bequeath. Fortunately, he is spared execution after a second physical examination.

With the Russian army approaching from the East, the Germans decide to evacuate Buna. The prisoners are forced to march at night through a snowstorm toward the Gleiwitz camp. It is a harrowing ordeal of over forty miles; running like a herd of animals, they are either shot by guards or trampled by other prisoners if they stop. Arriving at Gleiwitz, many of the prisoners die of exhaustion and cold, or by being crushed by other bodies in the overcrowded barracks. The evacuees remain there for three days in frigid conditions, without food or water. Eliezer’s father is utterly exhausted and weak, and barely escapes another selection when Eliezer creates a diversion, allowing his father to switch groups.

The surviving prisoners are put onto a train and endure severe hunger, violence, and abominable conditions as they travel through the German countryside to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Upon arriving, only Eliezer, his father, and ten other men survive, of the 100 who were crowded into the car at the start of the journey.

During the march to Gleiwitz, Eliezer sees a son abandon his struggling father; during the train journey to Buchenwald, he sees another child kill his father for a crust of bread. Eliezer supports his own father through these harrowing ordeals, and his father returns that support when he is able, helping to save Eliezer from being strangled to death at one point. However, when the two arrive at Buchenwald, Eliezer’s exhausted father begs his son to allow him to sleep, which means simply to die. Eliezer is torn between abandoning his father and doing all that is left in his power to persuade him to live. Eliezer’s father contracts dysentery, and in his weakened state is moved to a sickbed in the barracks. Eliezer pleads with a doctor to treat his father, but the doctor refuses contemptuously. Finally, an SS guard bludgeons Eliezer’s father for crying out from thirst, fracturing Elie’s father’s skull. Eliezer does not intervene, and doesn’t respond to his father’s dying word, the whispered name “Eliezer.” He looks at his father’s brutally beaten head for over an hour, then falls asleep. When he wakes, another prisoner is lying in his father’s bed; his father was moved to the crematorium in the middle of the night. Eliezer is unable to weep for his father and admits that if he felt something inside, it was probably relief at his death.

Three months later, the Americans arrive, liberating Buchenwald. Eliezer has nothing to say about the time that has elapsed since his father’s death. The newly-freed prisoners have no thoughts of revenge or family members, Eliezer claims; instead, they’re only concerned with eating. Eliezer contracts food poisoning three days after the liberation and is sent to a hospital for two weeks. There, he sees his reflection in a mirror for the first time since his deportation from Sighet. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazes back at him, and the look in its eyes never leaves him again.

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The Forgotten

The Perils of Indifference

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World War II

by Elie Wiesel

Night literary elements.

Memoir, Non-fiction

Setting and Context

Europe: Holocaust, World War II

Narrator and Point of View

First Person (Elie Wiesel)

Tone and Mood

Tone: Somber, austere, hopeless Mood: Dark, pessimistic, reflective

Protagonist and Antagonist

Protagonist: Eliezer, his father, his family; Antagonist: Nazi Germany

Major Conflict

Will Eliezer and his father survive the concentration camp? Will humanity survive the holocaust?

The climax occurs when Eliezer’s father passes away and darkness swallows Eliezer whole. Eliezer describes this moment as one that turned living into mere existence, and the following pages are so brief because Eliezer feels that he has nothing more to tell.

Foreshadowing

"the yellow star? So what, it's not lethal!" (Eliezer's father, pg. 11) “Fire, I see a fire!” “Jews, listen to me, I see a fire! I see flames, huge flames!” (Madame Schächter, pg. 24) "Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves." (Elie Wiesel, pg. 33)

Understatement

“The yellow star? So what? It’s not lethal..”(11)

“Conditions at Auchwitz was good, families would not be separated” (27)

1) Dr. Mengele (a notorious doctor who decided the selection of who was burned at Auschwitz and Birkenau. He was also known for carrying out horrific medical experiments on prisoners). (pg. 31) 2) The Red Army (the Soviet Army, affiliated with the communist party of the soviet union). (pg. 12) 3) The Angel of Death (sometimes referred to as Azrael is an angel in Abrahamic religions associated with destruction and renewal within the Hebrew Bible). (pg. 34) 4) The Resistance Movement (the American army who liberated the camps). (pg. 114) 5) Zionism (a Jewish movement beginning in the 1800s that resulted in the migration of Jews to Palestine, and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948). (pg. 8) 6) “Work makes you free” (this is the phrase in the iron fence in Auschwitz that Wiesel sees when they approached the camp. This became the most notorious phrase associated with the work camps). (pg. 40) 7) The day of liberation (April 10, 1945). (pg. 114)

Eliezer describes the dark, abysmal, hellish conditions of the concentration camps in which emotion is numbed and replaced by only pain or apathy.

In the Forward, Wiesel reveals that he isn’t sure if he wrote Night in order not to go mad, or whether he had to be mad in order to understand humanity’s true nature of madness.

Parallelism

In many areas, Wiesel parallels his experience with biblical ones; as he approaches the crematorium he describes nearing the “Angel of Death.” When he sees the hanging of the “Sad-Eyed Angel” he suggests that God himself has been executed.

Metonymy and Synecdoche

Juliek’s violin stands in for his person: when Juliek dies, so does his violin, and his last words were not uttered, but instead sung through the violin’s strings.

Personification

“the soup tasted like corpses” (65) “next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant little corpse” (95)

Night Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Night is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What did Eliezer mean when he said, "The whole year was Yom Kippur"?

In Elie Wiesel's memoir "Night," the phrase "The whole year was Yom Kippur" refers to the profound spiritual and existential crisis experienced by the Jewish prisoners in the concentration camps during the Holocaust. Yom Kippur is the Jewish Day...

Night, Chapter 2

From the text:

"There are eighty of you in the car," the German officer added. "If anyone goes missing, you will all be shot, like dogs."

What becomes elies main goal

In chapter three Elizer's main goal was for himself and his father to be selected for work and thus stay alive. They achieve this goal by lying to authorities and looking healthy enough to work.

Study Guide for Night

Night study guide contains a biography of Elie Wiesel, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Night
• Night Summary
• Character List

Essays for Night

Night essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Night by Elie Wiesel.

• Silent Night
• The Motivation in Night
• The Gospel According to Mark and Night: Would St. Mark Call Night a 'Religious Book'?
• NIght and the Problem of Evil
• The Changing Nature of the Relationship Between Elie and His Father in Night

Lesson Plan for Night

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Night
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Night Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for Night

• Introduction

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• Knowledge Base
• How to write a literary analysis essay | A step-by-step guide

How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay | A Step-by-Step Guide

Published on January 30, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on August 14, 2023.

Literary analysis means closely studying a text, interpreting its meanings, and exploring why the author made certain choices. It can be applied to novels, short stories, plays, poems, or any other form of literary writing.

A literary analysis essay is not a rhetorical analysis , nor is it just a summary of the plot or a book review. Instead, it is a type of argumentative essay where you need to analyze elements such as the language, perspective, and structure of the text, and explain how the author uses literary devices to create effects and convey ideas.

Before beginning a literary analysis essay, it’s essential to carefully read the text and c ome up with a thesis statement to keep your essay focused. As you write, follow the standard structure of an academic essay :

• An introduction that tells the reader what your essay will focus on.
• A main body, divided into paragraphs , that builds an argument using evidence from the text.
• A conclusion that clearly states the main point that you have shown with your analysis.

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Table of contents

Step 1: reading the text and identifying literary devices, step 2: coming up with a thesis, step 3: writing a title and introduction, step 4: writing the body of the essay, step 5: writing a conclusion, other interesting articles.

The first step is to carefully read the text(s) and take initial notes. As you read, pay attention to the things that are most intriguing, surprising, or even confusing in the writing—these are things you can dig into in your analysis.

Your goal in literary analysis is not simply to explain the events described in the text, but to analyze the writing itself and discuss how the text works on a deeper level. Primarily, you’re looking out for literary devices —textual elements that writers use to convey meaning and create effects. If you’re comparing and contrasting multiple texts, you can also look for connections between different texts.

To get started with your analysis, there are several key areas that you can focus on. As you analyze each aspect of the text, try to think about how they all relate to each other. You can use highlights or notes to keep track of important passages and quotes.

Language choices

Consider what style of language the author uses. Are the sentences short and simple or more complex and poetic?

What word choices stand out as interesting or unusual? Are words used figuratively to mean something other than their literal definition? Figurative language includes things like metaphor (e.g. “her eyes were oceans”) and simile (e.g. “her eyes were like oceans”).

Also keep an eye out for imagery in the text—recurring images that create a certain atmosphere or symbolize something important. Remember that language is used in literary texts to say more than it means on the surface.

Narrative voice

Ask yourself:

• Who is telling the story?
• How are they telling it?

Is it a first-person narrator (“I”) who is personally involved in the story, or a third-person narrator who tells us about the characters from a distance?

Consider the narrator’s perspective . Is the narrator omniscient (where they know everything about all the characters and events), or do they only have partial knowledge? Are they an unreliable narrator who we are not supposed to take at face value? Authors often hint that their narrator might be giving us a distorted or dishonest version of events.

The tone of the text is also worth considering. Is the story intended to be comic, tragic, or something else? Are usually serious topics treated as funny, or vice versa ? Is the story realistic or fantastical (or somewhere in between)?

Consider how the text is structured, and how the structure relates to the story being told.

• Novels are often divided into chapters and parts.
• Poems are divided into lines, stanzas, and sometime cantos.
• Plays are divided into scenes and acts.

Think about why the author chose to divide the different parts of the text in the way they did.

There are also less formal structural elements to take into account. Does the story unfold in chronological order, or does it jump back and forth in time? Does it begin in medias res —in the middle of the action? Does the plot advance towards a clearly defined climax?

With poetry, consider how the rhyme and meter shape your understanding of the text and your impression of the tone. Try reading the poem aloud to get a sense of this.

In a play, you might consider how relationships between characters are built up through different scenes, and how the setting relates to the action. Watch out for  dramatic irony , where the audience knows some detail that the characters don’t, creating a double meaning in their words, thoughts, or actions.

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Your thesis in a literary analysis essay is the point you want to make about the text. It’s the core argument that gives your essay direction and prevents it from just being a collection of random observations about a text.

If you’re given a prompt for your essay, your thesis must answer or relate to the prompt. For example:

Essay question example

Is Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” a religious parable?

Your thesis statement should be an answer to this question—not a simple yes or no, but a statement of why this is or isn’t the case:

Thesis statement example

Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” is not a religious parable, but a story about bureaucratic alienation.

Sometimes you’ll be given freedom to choose your own topic; in this case, you’ll have to come up with an original thesis. Consider what stood out to you in the text; ask yourself questions about the elements that interested you, and consider how you might answer them.

Your thesis should be something arguable—that is, something that you think is true about the text, but which is not a simple matter of fact. It must be complex enough to develop through evidence and arguments across the course of your essay.

Say you’re analyzing the novel Frankenstein . You could start by asking yourself:

Your initial answer might be a surface-level description:

The character Frankenstein is portrayed negatively in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .

However, this statement is too simple to be an interesting thesis. After reading the text and analyzing its narrative voice and structure, you can develop the answer into a more nuanced and arguable thesis statement:

Mary Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as.

Remember that you can revise your thesis statement throughout the writing process , so it doesn’t need to be perfectly formulated at this stage. The aim is to keep you focused as you analyze the text.

Finding textual evidence

To support your thesis statement, your essay will build an argument using textual evidence —specific parts of the text that demonstrate your point. This evidence is quoted and analyzed throughout your essay to explain your argument to the reader.

It can be useful to comb through the text in search of relevant quotations before you start writing. You might not end up using everything you find, and you may have to return to the text for more evidence as you write, but collecting textual evidence from the beginning will help you to structure your arguments and assess whether they’re convincing.

To start your literary analysis paper, you’ll need two things: a good title, and an introduction.

Your title should clearly indicate what your analysis will focus on. It usually contains the name of the author and text(s) you’re analyzing. Keep it as concise and engaging as possible.

A common approach to the title is to use a relevant quote from the text, followed by a colon and then the rest of your title.

If you struggle to come up with a good title at first, don’t worry—this will be easier once you’ve begun writing the essay and have a better sense of your arguments.

“Fearful symmetry” : The violence of creation in William Blake’s “The Tyger”

The introduction

The essay introduction provides a quick overview of where your argument is going. It should include your thesis statement and a summary of the essay’s structure.

A typical structure for an introduction is to begin with a general statement about the text and author, using this to lead into your thesis statement. You might refer to a commonly held idea about the text and show how your thesis will contradict it, or zoom in on a particular device you intend to focus on.

Then you can end with a brief indication of what’s coming up in the main body of the essay. This is called signposting. It will be more elaborate in longer essays, but in a short five-paragraph essay structure, it shouldn’t be more than one sentence.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advancement unrestrained by ethical considerations. In this reading, protagonist Victor Frankenstein is a stable representation of the callous ambition of modern science throughout the novel. This essay, however, argues that far from providing a stable image of the character, Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as. This essay begins by exploring the positive portrayal of Frankenstein in the first volume, then moves on to the creature’s perception of him, and finally discusses the third volume’s narrative shift toward viewing Frankenstein as the creature views him.

Some students prefer to write the introduction later in the process, and it’s not a bad idea. After all, you’ll have a clearer idea of the overall shape of your arguments once you’ve begun writing them!

If you do write the introduction first, you should still return to it later to make sure it lines up with what you ended up writing, and edit as necessary.

The body of your essay is everything between the introduction and conclusion. It contains your arguments and the textual evidence that supports them.

Paragraph structure

A typical structure for a high school literary analysis essay consists of five paragraphs : the three paragraphs of the body, plus the introduction and conclusion.

Each paragraph in the main body should focus on one topic. In the five-paragraph model, try to divide your argument into three main areas of analysis, all linked to your thesis. Don’t try to include everything you can think of to say about the text—only analysis that drives your argument.

In longer essays, the same principle applies on a broader scale. For example, you might have two or three sections in your main body, each with multiple paragraphs. Within these sections, you still want to begin new paragraphs at logical moments—a turn in the argument or the introduction of a new idea.

Robert’s first encounter with Gil-Martin suggests something of his sinister power. Robert feels “a sort of invisible power that drew me towards him.” He identifies the moment of their meeting as “the beginning of a series of adventures which has puzzled myself, and will puzzle the world when I am no more in it” (p. 89). Gil-Martin’s “invisible power” seems to be at work even at this distance from the moment described; before continuing the story, Robert feels compelled to anticipate at length what readers will make of his narrative after his approaching death. With this interjection, Hogg emphasizes the fatal influence Gil-Martin exercises from his first appearance.

Topic sentences

To keep your points focused, it’s important to use a topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph.

A good topic sentence allows a reader to see at a glance what the paragraph is about. It can introduce a new line of argument and connect or contrast it with the previous paragraph. Transition words like “however” or “moreover” are useful for creating smooth transitions:

… The story’s focus, therefore, is not upon the divine revelation that may be waiting beyond the door, but upon the mundane process of aging undergone by the man as he waits.

Nevertheless, the “radiance” that appears to stream from the door is typically treated as religious symbolism.

This topic sentence signals that the paragraph will address the question of religious symbolism, while the linking word “nevertheless” points out a contrast with the previous paragraph’s conclusion.

Using textual evidence

A key part of literary analysis is backing up your arguments with relevant evidence from the text. This involves introducing quotes from the text and explaining their significance to your point.

It’s important to contextualize quotes and explain why you’re using them; they should be properly introduced and analyzed, not treated as self-explanatory:

It isn’t always necessary to use a quote. Quoting is useful when you’re discussing the author’s language, but sometimes you’ll have to refer to plot points or structural elements that can’t be captured in a short quote.

In these cases, it’s more appropriate to paraphrase or summarize parts of the text—that is, to describe the relevant part in your own words:

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The conclusion of your analysis shouldn’t introduce any new quotations or arguments. Instead, it’s about wrapping up the essay. Here, you summarize your key points and try to emphasize their significance to the reader.

A good way to approach this is to briefly summarize your key arguments, and then stress the conclusion they’ve led you to, highlighting the new perspective your thesis provides on the text as a whole:

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By tracing the depiction of Frankenstein through the novel’s three volumes, I have demonstrated how the narrative structure shifts our perception of the character. While the Frankenstein of the first volume is depicted as having innocent intentions, the second and third volumes—first in the creature’s accusatory voice, and then in his own voice—increasingly undermine him, causing him to appear alternately ridiculous and vindictive. Far from the one-dimensional villain he is often taken to be, the character of Frankenstein is compelling because of the dynamic narrative frame in which he is placed. In this frame, Frankenstein’s narrative self-presentation responds to the images of him we see from others’ perspectives. This conclusion sheds new light on the novel, foregrounding Shelley’s unique layering of narrative perspectives and its importance for the depiction of character.

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