How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay
A literary analysis essay seeks to explore and analyze a piece of writing (or, in some syllabi, a visual text like a film, advertising poster, or graphic text). In most cases, the text in question will be a novel, play, poem, short story, or a nonfiction text.
It is easy to fall into the trap (especially in examinations) of summarizing or explaining what the text says, but this is not what a literary analysis is. Rather, a literary analysis focuses not on what the author says but on how they achieve the effect on the reader that they do. So if a text amuses, or frightens, or intrigues the reader, we are concerned with understanding how the author has achieved that.
The essential preparation for writing a literary analysis text is to be familiar with the text being analyzed. In an examination where the text is unseen, this requires the courage and the discipline to spend adequate time reading and re-reading the text before writing.
Where the text is already familiar to you, then the better you know it, the better chance you have of writing a good analysis of it.
Once you are familiar with the text, then you need to follow certain steps to make sure your essay is effective. Your essay should comprise the following sections:
- An introduction that sets out the thesis statement and the approach your essay will take.
- The main body paragraphs, each introduced by a topic sentence and dealing with a discrete idea.
- The conclusion that neatly sums up the argument and how you have demonstrated your main point.
Thesis statement: The initial stage directions before Scene One begins use a wealth of descriptions that appeal to our sense of sight, smell, touch, and sound.
Body paragraph topic sentences:
- The visual elements of the scene setting bring not just the look of the scene to life but contribute to how the play communicates to its audience.
- Hearing is appealed to by the mention of “tinny piano” music.
- The sense of smell is invoked by talk of coffee and bananas.
- Our sense of touch responds to the description of the “warm breath of the river.”
Becoming familiar with the text
How familiar you can become with the text depends on the situation. If you have studied a play, for instance, as part of your course and are then expected to write a literary analysis essay, then you should demonstrate an in-depth knowledge of the text.
On the other hand, an examination with a previously unseen text or extract will expect a different level of familiarity. However, in both cases, you will need to be able to talk authoritatively about the text’s features.
There is a useful mnemonic to help you remember the features you should consider when analyzing a text. In most cases, there won’t be time or space to consider all of them. The mnemonic is PLASTIC ST.
| P | Plot—what happens when and in what order? |
| L | Language—what language choices does the author make? |
| A | Audience & purpose—what is the purpose of the text, and who is the audience? |
| S | Stylistic devices—what stylistic devices are used (rhyme, syntax etc.)? |
| T | Tone and mood—what is the tone of the text and the mood it creates? |
| I | Imagery—what imagery is used (e.g., metaphor, simile, anthropomorphism, etc.)? |
| C | Character—what characters appear (including the narrator)? |
| S | Structure—how is the text structured? |
| T | Theme—what is/are the theme/themes of the text? |
The list is not in order of importance but is useful, especially in examinations when you need to explore how to approach a text and prompt.
Formulating your thesis
When presented with your essay prompt or question, you have to decide what your response will be to it, given your knowledge of the text. This response will help you to formulate your thesis, which in turn will drive the direction of your essay.
Thesis statement
- Both “Ulysses” and In Memoriam A. H. H. were written in response to the death of Tennyson’s friend Arthur Hallam, but deal with his feelings in different ways.
- Partly because of its brevity and partly because of its more indirect approach, “Ulysses” is indeed the more moving of the two poems.
It is important to formulate a thesis statement that answers the prompt directly and which can give your essay a clear direction and purpose.
Writing your outline plan
Your outline plan can be a very simple thing, containing your thesis statement and your topic sentences in the order you wish them to appear.
Formulating an effective topic sentence is possibly the hardest and probably the most important skill to learn for writing a literary analysis essay. You need to clarify your thoughts and articulate your idea. A good topic sentence will lead, almost inevitably, to a good paragraph.
Writing the body paragraphs
It’s rather counterintuitive, but the first thing you should write is not your introduction. Except in examinations (when you should always write the introduction first), in other cases you want to write your introduction once you know what your essay has demonstrated.
So, once you have completed your outline plan with its topic sentences, it’s time to turn each of those sentences into a paragraph. A useful mnemonic for paragraph structure is to remember the mnemonic PEE; each paragraph should follow the pattern:
| P | Point—your topic sentence |
| E | Evidence—the evidence from the text to back up your point |
| E | Explanation—your analysis of how the point is validated by the evidence |
The visual elements of the scene setting bring not just the look of the scene to life but contribute to how the play communicates to its audience. There is a wealth of visual description for the set designer to follow as it describes the scene at the opening of the play. Alongside simple descriptions such as “a two-story corner building” and “mostly white-frame, weathered gray,” there are other features that might be more challenging to produce on stage. The district, we read, has a “raffish charm,” and the sky is a “peculiarly tender blue, almost a turquoise,” which might cause discussion with the lighting director because of its subjective ambiguity. All of these details work together to produce not just a clear picture of the play’s physical setting but also the importance of that setting to the play. The blending of decay and beauty reflects Blanche’s own faded beauty, and the blue color echoes the blues that plays in the nearby street.
The process is repeated for each of your topic sentences, producing the body paragraphs of the essay.
Writing the introduction
Now it’s time to write the introduction. You know the points that your essay has made and demonstrated, so a brief statement of your thesis and how your essay addresses it will form your introduction.
It is a curiosity of Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire that the stage directions at the beginning of Scene One seem more suited to being read than being simple stage directions. One wonders, for instance, how the warmth will be communicated on stage or the aroma of bananas. However, there is no doubt that the senses are key to the way Williams seeks to bring the setting to life. Indeed, it is only taste that is missing from the palette of senses, but even this, it could be argued, is nodded to by mention of bananas and coffee (albeit in the realm of smell).
Writing the conclusion
Once you have written your introduction and body paragraphs, it’s time to write your conclusion. Conclusions can be tricky because you don’t want to just repeat what you have already said, but it’s important that you don’t introduce any new ideas. However, a brief summary of your main points and a restating of your central thesis will normally suffice.
Some playwrights give little-to-no stage directions, and others, like Tennessee Williams, detail very precisely what would appear on stage. In the case of A Streetcar Named Desire, we see close attention to detail that appeals to four of our five senses. It’s a moot point whether the production design will try to replicate the warmth and scent of bananas or whether the impact will be simply that it colors the production in other ways. The attention to these details helps to immerse the viewer (or even the reader) in the atmosphere of the location that is so central to the play.
Final steps
Checking your work is probably the most tedious, but one of the most important steps in writing an essay. When you have finished writing, it is tempting to leave it at that, but it is vital that you look it over carefully so you can check it for:
- Basic criteria—does the essay answer the prompt, and is it within the word count limits?
- Spelling and grammar errors (you can use the QuillBot Grammar Checker)
- Correct citations (try the QuillBot Citation Generator)
- Plagiarism (using the QuillBot Plagiarism Checker)
- Cohesion—does the essay as a whole hang together and make sense?
Example essay
Title: “I do not think that they will sing to me.” Sadness as a theme in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
The sadness conveyed by the narrator (whom we presume to be the eponymous J. Alfred Prufrock) weaves through the whole of Eliot’s poem. It exists in the first lines as Prufrock proposes a walk with an unnamed companion, persists through his awkward interactions with polite society, and finally fills his contemplation of the afterlife with dread. The sadness is evident in the seedy urban landscape laid out by the opening stanzas, with their hints of poverty, sexual infidelity, and grimy pollution. Perhaps most telling of all, it is created by Prufrock’s sense of his own inability to adequately express himself—paradoxically in a poem that is famously one of the greatest articulations of self-doubt and melancholy in the English language.
Part of Prufrock’s sadness is derived from, and caused by, his sense of failure and unfulfilled promise. From the tawdry “one-night cheap hotels” to the aging man wearing “the bottom of (his) trousers rolled,” Prufrock’s world is immersed in disappointment. There is sadness in the contrast between Prufrock’s early lofty thoughts “Do I dare Disturb the universe,” which a few stanzas later has degraded to “Do I dare to eat a peach?” The reader is saddened by his sense of diminishing abilities and significance. As he looks back at his life, he is struck by the brevity of his success and achievements that have been no more than a “moment of…greatness.” Having bombarded himself with the question of “Would it have been worth it after all,” or “Would it have been worthwhile,” he is left with nothing but a stroll on the beach.
These feelings of failure and inadequacy are wrapped up with the sadness caused by Prufrock’s social anxiety and inadequacy (whether perceived or real). From his determination to “make (his) visit” in the early stages of the poem, his interactions with affluent society are overrun with insecurity and paranoia. The rigid rituals of society, “the taking of a toast and tea,” fill him with anxiety. He feels judged, observed, and criticized by the women in society, by their “eyes that fix (him) in a formulated phrase.” Those formulated phrases leave him “formulated, sprawling on a pin,” like a fly trapped by sadistic children. Because of his many insecurities he is overwhelmed by fear of misreading the social cues of the woman he desires. His dread, repeated in paraphrase to underline its importance, his fear of rejection, is that the woman should say, “That is not what I meant at all; That is not it, at all.”
Significant though these causes of sadness are, they are overshadowed by Prufrock’s fear of death and insignificance. After all his agonizing (“I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed”), Prufrock’s fear is that his faculties have now failed him, he has “seen the moment of (his) greatness flicker.” This fear is inextricably linked in his mind to his fear about the afterlife; as the “eternal Footman” waits to pass him his coat, he “(snickers).” “In short,” says Prufrock, “I was afraid.” Perhaps the saddest idea in the entire poem is his contemplation of the mermaids. The charming image of mermaids singing to each other is brutally undermined by the single isolated line, “I do not think that they will sing to me.” After everything, it seems that all hope has evaporated for Prufrock, bringing to a close the sense of sadness that pervades his love song.
Sadness is one of the elements that contributes to the beauty of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The mellifluous language, the subtle rhymes, the evocation of a kind of urban beauty, all of these combine to create a poem of beauty and melancholy. Although sadness is just one feature of Prufrock’s love song, it is a significant one, given its prevalence throughout the work, and its profound effect on the reader. It is, of course, remarkable that Eliot was able to capture the regret and neuroses of a middle-aged man when he himself was only 22 years old. The poem stands as a testament to the beauty of melancholy and how poetry can be used to explore such a profound human emotion.
Frequently asked questions about literary analysis essays
- What should a strong conclusion in a literary analysis always include?
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A strong conclusion in a literary analysis essay should always include a brief summary of your main points and a restatement and reframing of your overall thesis.
A conclusion can be a challenge to do well, because you don’t want to just repeat yourself, and you shouldn’t introduce any major new idea.
The QuillBot online Notepad can help you keep track of your ideas and plan your literary analysis essay. Additionally, you can use the QuillBot Paraphrasing extension to help you rephrase your ideas to make your point without being repetitive.
- What are the first steps to take when organizing a literary analysis?
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Getting the first steps right when writing a literary analysis is like making sure a building’s foundations are done properly. If you get it wrong, it undermines the rest of your work.
The most important first steps are:
- Make yourself familiar with the text. The deeper your knowledge, the easier it is to analyze it.
- Compose your thesis statement.
- Write your topic sentences and put them in the best logical order.
- Write your body paragraphs.
- Write your introduction.
- Write the conclusion.
QuillBot’s free online Notepad can help you keep track of your ideas throughout the essay-writing process. When you have finished your first draft then it’s time to proofread your work, check the grammar and spelling (you can use the QuillBot Grammar Checker), check any citations (try the QuillBot Citation Generator), and check for plagiarism (using the QuillBot Plagiarism Checker).
