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Writing about themes in an extract is different from writing about a complete text.

With an extract, there are two possibilities:

1. You might be given a theme in the text to explore. In this case focus on finding examples of this theme to write about.
2. If you are not given a theme, you need to infer the themes from the text. Are there repeated images, motifs or references to an important idea?

In either case, think about the following:

• How does the language support the theme?
• Do images or individual words suggest a theme?
• How does the content support the theme?
• Which events help to develop the ideas in the text?
• How do the characters represent the theme?

Example

The opening of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley describes a setting with very little action. However, we can gather a lot of information about the text from this.

The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic gooseflesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables.

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

Analysis

The author creates a cold atmosphere in this extract:

• The ‘harsh thin light’ shines on a clinical and unfriendly setting.
• The workers have ‘corpse-coloured’ rubber gloves.
• The building is unfriendly – it’s ‘squat’ and ‘grey’ – and it belongs to the ‘World State’.
• The word ‘hatchery’ sounds sinister (spoiler alert - this isn’t where chickens are hatched, but where they grow humans!)
• The metaphor ‘the light was frozen, dead, a ghost’ emphasizes the lifelessness of the place.

These combine to suggest two themes:

• life and death
• man versus nature

Even from this short extract it’s clear that the scientific setting is important. Those who work in the centre are almost lifeless.

The way the light seems to be fighting against the sterile laboratory suggests there is a tension between man and nature.

Colour and light are important images in this extract. They can be used to support the theme of life and death. Light is usually a sign of life, but here it is negative.