Chapter Three: Theme

   It was my freshman year here at Southeastern when I first realize my struggles with going deeper into a text and looking beyond what was just before me. I tend to be a very black and white person. I don’t want there to be any question of what is going on, it is either this or that, no grey area.
   What caused me to notice this inside me was an assignment in my English Comp 2 class. The teacher handed us a photo. The picture was outdoors with a large bridge suspended over a river, next to the river a few feet from the bottom of the bridge was a very run-down shack surrounded by junk. It looked like someone one had been collecting random things thrown on the street or washed up on the river bank and took it back to that shack. The teacher asked us to go and write a one page response about the picture. So I went back and in a few more words described the picture like I just did for you. I went into as much detail as possible, because I didn’t see how I could write one page on this one picture. Somehow I pulled it out. He then asked us to talk about what we wrote, people started talking about how they saw it as the two different levels of society and how the upper class goes rushing by like the cars on the bridge never even noticing the lower class, or one student talked about how they saw it as a gateway into heave and how there was so much hope. Each time someone would say their thoughts I would gaze at the picture in confusion and think, how on earth did they get all that from this picture? That class is where my realization came: I am a very black and white thinker.
   The very same concept happened when I was reading the Piercy poem A Work of Artifice. It talked about a bonsai tree and a gardener and the last bit kind of confused me. The sentence explaining the poem said, “We can all agree that Piercy’s poem is “about” the oppression of women.” We can? We can all agree on that? Because I didn’t get that one bit! The more I thought about it and talked it out with my roommate I began to see how maybe someone could take it that way. Unfortunately I have a long way to go in understanding “theme”.