Convey Your Theme Without Stating It —— 5 Steps to Stop Overexplaining

The more you explain, the lighter your story gets.

So what do you do instead?

It comes down to two moves. Together, they let objects take the lead.

Place your characters by role, not psychology.
Don't state your theme. Let the movement of objects carry it.

Today we'll learn both from Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye.

Let's go.

Four Characters Built on Roles, Not Psychology

The most striking thing about this book is how little it digs into anyone's inner life.

Instead, each character carries a single job.

I'll separate what actually happens in the book from the role I read into it.

Simone
In the book: a girl around the narrator's age who keeps instigating one transgression after another.
Role: the engine of desire that drives the transgression.

Marcelle
In the book: a shy, innocent girl the other two pull in. She later breaks down and takes her own life.
Role: the brake, embodying shame and taboo.

Sir Edmund
In the book: a wealthy Englishman who appears in the second half. Cool-headed, he bankrolls the pair's getaway.
Role: the director who makes transgression possible and sets the stage.

The priest
In the book: a young priest at a church in Spain who becomes the target of the final blasphemy.
Role: the stand-in for the sacred.

Not one of them says, "When I was little, my father told me..."
And yet every one of them holds up on the page.

Why?
Because their roles are set up to collide.

Simone and Marcelle Only Mean Something Together

The key is how they're paired.

Simone is the one who crosses lines.
Marcelle is the one who feels shame.

Think about it for a second. Without someone who feels shame, would crossing the line mean anything at all?

It wouldn't. No prohibition, no transgression. The taboo is what gives breaking it its weight.

That dynamic, transgression needing a taboo, is something Bataille later tackled head-on in his essay Erotism.

But Story of the Eye never explains it, not once.
It just sets Simone and Marcelle side by side.

And the contrast doesn't end when Marcelle dies.

At the very end, the narrator stares at a certain "eye" and sees Marcelle's blue eye in it.

That's the narrator's own account in the book. Even after she's gone, the brake comes back through an object.

Amazing, right? You don't have to write a character's inner life. Placement and a returning object can say this much.

The Protagonist Isn't a Person. It's an Object

"Wait, isn't the protagonist of a novel supposed to be a person?"

You'd think so.
I did too, at first.

But the French critic Roland Barthes wrote something to this effect about the book (in his 1963 essay "The Metaphor of the Eye").

This isn't the story of Simone, Marcelle, or the narrator. It's the story of an object.

That object is the eye.
Or more precisely, things that are like an eye.

An egg.
A saucer of milk.
An eye.
And the testicles cut from a bull in the ring.

Round, white things that can spill over. They change shape as they're relayed from scene to scene.

Hmm.

It's not the people carrying the baton. It's the baton making the people run. That's what it feels like.

Blasphemy Without a Sermon: Let Objects and Structure Carry the Theme

Sex, death, and the sacred.

Those big themes sit at the root of this book. But the story itself almost never states them outright.

All you get are two things.

Repeated acts.
Objects that transform.

In her 1967 essay "The Pornographic Imagination," the American critic Susan Sontag compares Bataille with the Marquis de Sade.

Here's my own summary of it.

Sade's books stage huge orgies over and over, sometimes stopping the action for long philosophical speeches.
Bataille's work is much shorter, with fewer people, and far denser.

Sure enough, the novel itself has almost no sermon about why anyone does what they do.

What's interesting is the short piece that follows the main story. There, Bataille reveals after the fact that the book's images were tied to memories of his own father.

In other words, the author pushed the explanation of meaning outside the story.

So what happens to the reader? You're left to witness a chain of transgressions, with no meaning handed to you.

That's why the shock lingers, and why each reader is free to interpret it their own way.

5 Steps You Can Try Today

Now for the real point.

You don't have to write about sex or blasphemy, of course. You're only stealing the mechanism.

It has two parts.

Design characters by function, not as psychological subjects.
Don't argue your theme in narration. Let the placement and movement of objects carry it.

Here are steps you can try in your own draft right away.

1. List your characters, and next to each name write a short role instead of a personality (e.g., the one who crosses lines / the one who stops it / the one who sets things up / the stand-in for something unforgivable).

2. Find one pair whose roles oppose each other. If there isn't one, add a character who stands on the opposite side of your lead.

3. Pick one object that can appear again and again in your story. Ideally, something that can return in different shapes or colors.

4. For each scene, write one line on where that object turns up and whose hands it moves between.

5. Find sentences in your draft that explain a character's feelings or your theme, and ask whether each could be replaced with an object's movement.

That alone will change how your draft feels.

Cutting explanation is scary. But your readers are much smarter than you think.

Trust them, and let objects take the lead.