Narrative Messages Part 1

The theme of a story is its moral, its message, its meaning. Today, the story's theme is rarely, if ever, explicitly stated. Instead, the writer leaves it to the reader to figure out the meaning of the story for him- or herself. The theme, in other words, is suggested by the story as a whole, especially through the main character's behavior and speech and through the action and dialogue of the other characters with whom he or she interacts. It is implicitly stated.

Because stories express themes, they have depth. A story without a message would be not only very simple, but it also would not be much worth reading. People want to be entertained. They also want to learn about life, about how others view life, and about what their stand-ins, the characters about whom they read, believe about life-or some narrow aspect of it-and why. People are constantly assessing and revising their own attitudes, beliefs, choices, decisions, emotions, ideas, perceptions, reasoning, and situations. Fiction-and the themes it expresses-helps them to do so.

This essay reviews my stand-alone transsexual stories that Literotica's readers have found most popular to date:

At Risk

Beefy Buns

Best Policy, The

Boy Meets Girl

End of the Line

Film At Eleven

Pygmalion

Triptych

I have also written BDSM, gay, and incest stories. If the essay proves popular. I may follow this survey with a sequel or sequels in which I discuss the themes of these other types of erotic fiction.

I've decided that the simplest approach is an alphabetical one, so I will consider the stories according to their sequence in the alphabet. Unlike Literotica, though, I am alphabetizing them according to the first major word of their title, meaning that I'm not counting definite or indefinite articles, such as "A," "An," or "The" as part of the titles. I won't summarize the stories in detail, assuming that the interested reader will already have read them or will read them before he or she reads my analyses of their themes.