Following are sample thesis statements demonstrating various aspects of traditional literary analysis. Though not arguable enough to warrent development as essays in a course on critical thinking, they nonetheless model effective literary theses.

Character Analysis
In his novel Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad symbolizes Jim’s development as a character by three incidents involving leaps or jumps that Jim fails to make, makes inadvertently, and makes deliberately.

Point of View
Shirley Jackson renders the horror of her story “The Lottery” through her rudimentary but expert characterization, her almost clinically detached selection of details, and her deceivingly simple diction.

Setting
The integration of setting and story in Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” may be followed in details about the Captain's cabin and the ocean itself, and also in Conrad’s suggestions that large, cosmic forces are at work in human affairs.

Comparison and Contrast
Both Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce portray the recollections of their heroes with ambiguity on toward early education; this ambivalence may be seen in the punishment it represents in both works, in the rebellious attitudes of the heroes, and in their respective liberation.

Imagery or Symbolism
In “Young Goodman Brown,” Nathaniel Hawthorne dramatizes the idea that the overvaluation of an abstract concept of good and evil devalues human beings; he expresses this in the richly suggestive allegory and in the many symbols in the work, particularly the symbolism of the sunset, the walking stick, and the path through the woods.

Tone
In “The Open Boat” Stephen Crane shows admiration and sympathy for the four men cast adrift, and he also exhibits bafflement and mild scorn at the apparent indifference of the universe; Crane renders his admiration and scorn through his descriptions of the men, his commentary on the situation, and his irony.