How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay

What is a literary analysis essay?

A literary analysis essay makes an argument about a novel, poem, play or story: a claim about how the text works and what it means, supported by evidence from the text itself. It differs from a summary, which retells what happens, and from a review, which judges whether the work is good. Analysis assumes your reader knows the plot and asks the questions that come after it: how, and why?

The answers come from the writer's choices. Who tells the story, and how reliable are they? Why does the novel begin where it does? What does a repeated image accumulate by the end? Why is this poem a sonnet rather than free verse? An essay that answers one of those questions well, with close attention to particular passages, is a literary analysis. An essay that walks through the plot chapter by chapter, however accurately, is not.

Read closely and gather evidence

Analysis starts with noticing. Read the text once for the story, then reread the passages that matter with a pencil in hand, marking anything that repeats, surprises or shifts. Patterns are what you are hunting for, because a single detail is an observation while a pattern is the start of an argument. The guides to doing a close reading and to annotating a book set out the method in depth. As you reread, track:

• Words and images that recur, and whether their meaning changes.
• Who is speaking or narrating, and what they cannot or will not see.
• Shifts in tone, tense, setting or point of view, and where they happen.
• How the work is divided and ordered: chapters, stanzas, acts, frames.
• Moments that feel odd or excessive, which often mark what the text cares most about.

What to analyze: the main elements of a literary text

Every literary analysis focuses on one or more elements of the text. Two well-known works by the Shelleys show how. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) is a novel built from nested narratives, and Percy Shelley's “Ozymandias”, published the same year, is a sonnet about a ruined statue. The table pairs each element with questions to ask and an example.

You do not need to cover every element. The strongest essays usually pick one or two and follow them through the whole work, because depth on narration alone says more than a paragraph each on six elements. Let the prompt and your annotations decide: if your margins are full of notes about who is speaking, narration is your subject.

Write a literary analysis thesis

A literary analysis thesis makes an interpretive claim: it says how a text works and why that matters, in a way another reader could dispute. Weak: “Frankenstein is about the dangers of science.” That names a theme everyone already associates with the book. Stronger: “By placing the creature's story inside Victor's and Victor's inside Walton's letters, Frankenstein lets readers hear the creature's own account only as Victor retells it, so the novel's real question becomes whose account deserves belief.”

The stronger thesis does three things: it points to a specific feature (the nested narration), it explains the effect (we see the creature through a hostile witness), and it claims a meaning (the novel is about the trust we give to narrators). A good test is whether the thesis could only be written by someone who read the book closely. For more on that sentence, see the guide to writing a thesis statement.

Using quotations as evidence

In literary analysis, quotations are evidence, and short ones work best. Quote the exact words your point depends on — often a single phrase or even one word — and blend them into your own sentence rather than dropping them in alone. Then spend more words analyzing the quotation than quoting it. Paraphrase plot events instead of quoting them; save quotation for language you are going to examine. The guide to avoiding plagiarism shows how to introduce a quotation and trim it with ellipses and square brackets.

Cite every quotation the way your course expects. Literature essays commonly use MLA style, citing by page for prose and by line for poetry; see the MLA citation guide for the format. Write about the text in the present tense — Victor abandons the creature, the speaker meets a traveler — because the events happen whenever the book is read.

How to write a literary analysis in seven steps

This sequence takes you from a first reading to a finished essay:

1. 1Read the whole text once for the story, then reread the passages most relevant to the prompt.
2. 2Annotate for patterns: repeated words and images, shifts, structural choices, unreliable moments.
3. 3Choose one pattern and ask how and why it matters to the meaning of the whole work.
4. 4Write a working thesis that names the feature, its effect and the meaning it creates.
5. 5Collect three to five passages as evidence, each with a page or line reference.
6. 6Outline body paragraphs, each making one claim about one aspect of the pattern, in an order that builds.
7. 7Draft with short, embedded quotations and full analysis, then revise to cut summary and check the present tense.

A literary analysis paragraph, worked through

Here is how one body paragraph on Frankenstein might run. It begins with a claim: Victor's refusal to name his creation is a refusal of responsibility. The evidence is that throughout his narrative Victor calls the creature by insults — “wretch”, “daemon”, “fiend” — and never by a name, while the creature, in his own account, describes learning language by secretly watching a cottage family and reading books he finds.

The analysis follows: a name is the first thing a parent gives, and Victor's labels do the opposite, defining the creature by what Victor fears rather than what it is. Because readers hear most of the story in Victor's words, his labels become ours, until the creature's eloquent narrative unsettles them. The paragraph ends by linking back to the thesis: the novel teaches readers to distrust the vocabulary of its main narrator.

Common literary analysis mistakes

Most low marks in literature essays come from a short list of habits. Watch for these in your draft:

• Retelling the plot instead of analyzing it; assume your reader has read the book.
• Naming a device (“the author uses imagery”) without explaining its effect on meaning.
• Using the author's biography as the argument rather than the text.
• Claiming to know what the author intended instead of arguing from what the text does.
• Quoting long passages with a sentence of comment after each.
• Drifting into the past tense when describing events in the text.