Comparing Theme Across Genres

Theme is the crucial connection between 2 really various categories of literature. A style can expose numerous significant messages to people all over. Comparing the short story "The Mountain" and the poem "Occurrence", I discovered that they share a common theme. Both themes convey a message of discrimination and mistake. Martin Hamer, author of "The Mountain" and Countee Cullen author of "Incident" both use literary gadgets such as repetition, conflict to convey the theme that in some cases in life, individuals determine a person by their look or what they appear like on the exterior.

Hamer uses repetition and dispute in his narrative to communicate the theme. The story starts the repeating words "two little dark kids". Hamer uses repetition here for emphasis or to stress a great point. His emphasis is referring to the look of the two primary characters and is also preparing you for the conflict that is about to happen. As the kids are riding the bus, a woman next to them recognizes that her bag is open and wallet is missing.

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"Provide me back my wallet," she says immediately presuming that the two dark young boys had actually taken it.

The conflict is that the woman automatically assumed the boys had stolen it because of the way they looked. This conflict unquestionably expresses the theme because the woman completely judged the two boys by their appearance. Short stories express theme by creating a story that has a good moral in it to spread throughout the world of readers.

Countee Cullen uses conflict as well as tone to convey the theme in his poem “Incident”. Cullen tells about an experience he had when he came across a Baltimorean who “poked out his tongue, and called him nigger”.

The conflict that is exposed here is racial discrimination. The man called him an extremely offensive name because of his appearance or in other words his skin color. Cullen says he “saw the whole of Baltimore from May until December”. By using tone, he exposes his attitude toward that experience and the entire city of Baltimore. Cullen’s attentive tone tells that after that experience he then noticed that the entire city of Baltimore was the same, prejudice. Poets do not just reveal their theme. They carefully place it in literary devices to force the reader to figure it out themselves.