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

Here the author examines character and, by extension, plot, which are two major elements of narrative. People relate to other people, so readers take interest in characters, who must behave according to the terms of the plot. At the same time, Foster argues, it’s important to remember that characters are not real, only products of the imagination—both the author’s and the reader’s. For readers to care about a character that doesn’t exist, they have to imbue that character with hopes, dreams, and feelings of their own:

The writer invents him, using such elements of memory and observation and invention as she needs, and the reader—not readers collectively this time but each individual reader in private—reinvents him, using those same elements of his memory, his observation, and his invention (82).

The chapter’s title refers to the fact that main characters rarely die because when they do, the story is over. Thus, other characters close to the protagonist die and have other bad things happen to them to move the plot forward. Foster credits Aristotle with the identification of the closeness of these two elements: “[p]lot is character revealed in action” (89). Foster notes that their influence works in both directions, as characters are also shaped by the plot.

At this point in the book, the author takes a couple of pages to imagine incredulous students learning about literature and the “hidden” meanings. He argues that while readers can never know for sure if a writer intended to place meaning in a hidden place, he believes that it is more likely true that the writer did include the meaning intentionally. Modernists like Joyce and Eliot almost certainly included such meanings and symbolism because that was part of their defining style. Writers before them were well educated in Latin and Greek, Shakespeare, and the Bible, so they would have been steeped in knowledge. Finally, writers in general are voracious readers who imbibe past literature and probably refer to it in their work, even if only subconsciously. 

While discussing violence in Chapter 11, Foster says that it comes in two forms: character-on-character violence and author-imposed violence. He discusses authors like D. H. Lawrence and William Faulkner, whose works are rife with violence. There are plot reasons for the violence, but it can often be symbolic as well. Lawrence uses it make statements about capitalism and gender relations, while Faulkner’s violence exposes the continued horrors of slavery. The reasons for including violence in literature are numerous, and “[i]t’s nearly impossible to generalize about the meanings of violence, except that there are typically more than one, and its range of possibilities is far larger than with something like rain or snow” (103).

This chapter deals with symbols, a mainstay in the interpretation of literature. The problem, Foster writes, is that readers often want symbols to have one and only one true meaning, the way a math problem has just one answer. That can never be because no two readers are exactly alike: they bring a diverse mix of viewpoints, background, experience, reading history, etc. to their interpretation of literary texts. The reader has as much to do with a text’s meaning as the author. Thus, the meanings of symbols can vary according to an author’s use of them and a reader’s understanding of them. Foster demonstrates this point in a discussion of the meaning of a river in texts by Mark Twain, T. S. Eliot, and Hart Crane. Another common difficulty for readers involves the interpretation of symbols as a stand-in for objects; symbols can also represent actions and events. 

Foster describes the political dimension of stories that, on the surface, seem to lack political meaning. In these stories, the themes must be drawn out by examining the work as a whole. He shows that A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, is more than a heartwarming seasonal tale; it was an attempt by Dickens to poke holes in the theories of Thomas Malthus, which were popular at the time. Malthus argued that helping those in need would lead to overpopulation, and that the weakest, poorest members of society would proliferate. Dickens’s character Scrooge initially embodies Malthus’s cold-heartedness, but, by the end of the tale, Scrooge has a change of heart, which illustrates Dickens’s view on the issue. Other examples of literature with a political theme are Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” a comment on democracy, and works by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, who write about individualism versus traditional society.

Religion has a profound effect on cultures everywhere, and in the West, Christianity has largely been the dominant religion. Foster provides a list of notions that are associated with Jesus Christ, and then applies the list to several works of literature. One famous story is Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, which is about an old fisherman in Cuba whom everyone thinks is past his prime but who proceeds to catch a huge fish. Foster argues that the fisherman can be seen symbolically as a Christ figure; he has wounds to his hands, a struggle in the wilderness, and he disappears at sea for three days. The fisherman’s return to shore can be seen as a resurrection. 

Early in this chapter, Foster writes that “flight is freedom” (136). In literature, flying is associated with being free, breaking out of constraints, and expanding one’s horizons. It can mean literal freedom, as in the work of Toni Morrison and William Faulkner, who both write about themes connected to slavery. More often, flying is used symbolically, as Joyce does in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to express a character’s urge to escape the provincial confines of Dublin. In addition, the failure to fly, or an act of falling, can also have significance in a story. For example, authors can use a character’s surviving a plane crash to ponder the meaning of life after cheating death.