Implicit and Explicit Main Ideas |
| It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. |
Hughes tells the story to make a point, but he does not explicitly state his main idea in the same way that Orwell does in "A Hanging." The young Hughes cries in bed after the revival service, awakening his grandmother who thinks that he is crying because the holy ghost has come into his life. However, Hughes gives a different reason.
| But I was really crying because I couldn't bear to tell her that I had lied, that I had deceived everybody in the church, that I hadn't seen Jesus, and that now I didn't believe there was a Jesus anymore, since he didn't come to help me. |
Because it is implicit, different readers may interpret the meaning in different ways based on their own experiences with church, their education, the culture in which they were raised, and other factors.
One might conclude that the main idea is that because children want to place a literal interpretation on what they are told, they become disallusioned when what they expect does not happen. Hughes was told that Jesus would come into his life, and so he wanted to see Jesus.
Another lesson that might be drawn from the essay is that when someone is pressured into acting in a way contrary to what they believe or know to be true, they suffer remorse and guilt as a consequence.
Similar interpretations are also possible. One might conclude that religious conversion cannot be imposed from outside but must emanate from within, or that forced adherence to community expectations induces hypocracy and disrespect.
When trying to identify the main idea of an essay, keep in mind that the main idea must apply not only to the particular circumstances of the case presented but also to similar situations involving other people at other times and places.
If a meaning applies only to the one particular case, then it is too narrow to be of value in making sense of other situations, and a meaning that cannot be generalized beyond the immideate context is trivial and not worth remembering because it is the one shot in a million that is unlikely to be repeated.
Most narratives give enough information about the people and events to allow a reader to draw some conclusions about possible meanings. However, it is also true that many times subtiles and ambiguities exist which make it hard to say exactly what the best possible interpretation may be, and so a single best answer may not be possible.
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