in short

mate questions, not just pragmatic ones; in short, to provide a personal expres­ sion in narrative form of our sense of what life is like. As the writer Steven Mill­ hauser remarked, “When I write I have the sense that what compels me isn’t the promotion of certain values, but something else-the working out of a har­ mony, the completion of a necessary design. This may be just another way of insisting that the values that belong to art are aesthetic. Exactly how moral val­ ues fit in is for a trained philosopher to say.”

To paraphrase the writer Milan Kundera, great storytellers refuse to give explicit moral judgment a place in their fiction. Their stories aren’t simple moral parables in which good triumphs over evil. To create a complex fictional world reflecting actual human experience, writers try to suspend their moral judgment. Often they provide multiple moral viewpoints within the story through their dramatization of the conflicting points of view of the various characters. They leave it to the reader to come up with his or her own moral judgment in the statement of the story’s theme.

A gifted storyteller says, “Let me tell you how it is,” and our interest as readers is always in what the whole story can show us about human experience. Your statement of the theme suggests your understanding of the author’s vision of the meaning of life. For example, if you realize that Anton Chekhov deliber­ ately created sympathetic characterizations of Gurov and Anna in “The Lady with the Pet Dog” (p. 102), you will probably decide that the author’s theme is better rendered as a statement of a deep truth (love is a serious business) than as a moral injunction (do not commit adultery).

Theme comes last in a discussion of the elements of fiction because it is a consequence of all the other elements in a story. The structure and theme of a story are fused like the body and soul of a reader; their interaction creates a liv­ ing pattern. Authors work hard to breathe life into their fiction. Most do not like to abstract the meaning of their stories to explain what they are “about.” Even when they do, as the southern writer Flannery O’Connor did in her ex­ planation of a theme of”A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (p. 672) or as William Faulkner did in discussing “A Rose for Emily” (p. 598), some readers agree intellectually but not emotionally with the writer’s interpretation. O’Connor said she understood that her story might be read in d