Theme Tracker

Theme Tracker

A weak essay says "the theme is responsibility" and stops. A strong one tracks that theme, showing how it grows and changes from the first scene to the last. Themes are not static labels. The examiner rewards you for showing a theme's journey: • where it is introduced • how it is developed and complicated along the way • where it ends up, and what that leaves an audience feeling We will practise on An Inspector Calls, in our own words throughout. The tracking skill works for any modern text.

Tracking or labelling?

Which sentence TRACKS a theme, rather than merely labelling it or retelling the plot?

• Responsibility begins as something Birling denies exists and ends as something his own children argue for
• One of the main themes of the play is responsibility
• The Inspector arrives at the Birlings' house and questions each of them in turn
• Sheila Birling is a young woman who is engaged to Gerald Croft

The big themes

*An Inspector Calls* is built on a handful of themes worth tracking. Each is a question the play keeps asking, rather than a topic it mentions:

Who carries the theme?

Track it through contrast

Here is the move that lifts a theme paragraph out of the middle band. Instead of writing about one character who represents a theme, write about the pattern the writer has built: characters placed on opposite sides of the same idea, so that the clash IS the theme in action. The test is simple. If your paragraph could survive with one character deleted from it, you are describing a character. If deleting one breaks the point, you are analysing a pattern, and that is what the marks are for.

Trace the theme

Put these moments in the development of the RESPONSIBILITY theme into the order they happen.

• Mr Birling insists a man should look after only himself and his own
• The Inspector exposes how each Birling harmed the same young woman
• Sheila and Eric begin to accept their share of the blame
• The Inspector warns that we are all responsible for one another
• A final phone call announces that a real inspector is on his way

A worked arc: class

Here is the same tracking done on a different theme, so you can see the shape rather than memorise one answer. Introduced: Birling opens the play pleased with himself, talking about the knighthood he expects and the marriage that will tie his firm to a larger one. Class is presented as something you climb. Developed: the Inspector shows what the climbing costs. Eva Smith loses one job for asking for a small rise, and the next because Sheila, in a good mood or a bad one, complained about her. Complicated: Mrs Birling refuses her charity's help to a working-class woman precisely because she found her manner impertinent. Class stops being about money and becomes about who is allowed to ask. Where it ends: once the family believe the inspector was a fake, the thing they hurry to protect is their standing. The theme closes on exactly what it opened on.

Find the development

This is a sentence from a student essay, not from the play. Tap the part that shows the theme DEVELOPING, rather than the part that only says where it started.

• Priestley introduces responsibility through Birling's complacent speech to the dinner table
• and then turns it inside out, so that by the final act his own children are arguing the case he laughed at

Why is the theme there?

A theme is never in a text by accident. In a modern text especially, it is carrying the writer's purpose, and the difference between the two bands of answer is whether you ever say so:

Why that pattern?

Priestley makes the YOUNG characters accept responsibility while the OLDER ones reject it. What is his most likely purpose?

• To suggest that hope for a fairer society lies with the younger generation
• To show that young people are foolish and easily led
• To argue that nothing in society can ever really change
• Simply to give the plot a wider range of characters

The tracking vocabulary

An essay that tracks a theme moves through the text in order. Start with the moment the theme is _____, move to the moments that _____ it, and finish with where the text leaves it. Along the way, set the characters who _____ the theme against those who resist it, because that contrast is the theme in _____.

Which theme?

A question asks: "How does Priestley explore the way wealth protects some people from the consequences of what they do?" Which theme should you track?

• Class, following how money and status shield the Birlings from the results of their actions
• Age, following how the younger and older characters differ
• Gender, following how the women in the play are judged
• All four themes equally, so that nothing is left out

Track it yourself

Exam practice. In about 60 words, trace how the theme of RESPONSIBILITY develops across An Inspector Calls. Include:

• where the theme starts (an early moment, in your own words)
• how it develops and is complicated through the middle of the play
• where it ends up, and which characters embody opposite attitudes to it

Thread traced

A theme is a thread rather than a label: show where it starts, how it grows, and where the text _____ it. Track it through _____ characters who take opposite positions, and remember that in a modern text the theme is finally serving the _____ purpose, which for Priestley was a _____ argument about how a society should treat its weakest members.