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When analyzing a text one should be exploring and identifying three key things to help interpret the author’s intention for the text to the reader. One should be searching for the following: paradox, juxtaposition, and irony. These three things can help one find the deeper meanings of the author and ascertain a better understanding of the author’s intent.

Paradox
The key word to remember paradox is that it’s a contradiction that might be true. Anyone can simply look up a definition, but my goal is that you truly understand the concept not simply read a denotation of a word. An example of this is a computer tells a user that it cannot detect your keyboard, however, if you click F1 it will reconnect. The contradiction here is that the PC is telling the user that the way to make the keyboard detectable again is by clicking a key on the board. The reason it is a paradox is because following the contradiction may actually resolve the issue.

Juxtaposition
To remember juxtaposition one should think of the word contrast or different. It’s putting words, phrases, or ideas side by side that contrast one another. For example, night and day, peace and war, or light and darkness. These are contrasting words but it could also be ideas like Cinderella being good and doing as she is told and helping wherever and whenever she can contrasted to her wicked step sisters who are lazy and treat Cinderella with indignation.

Irony
Probably the easiest of the three to identify. Remember this, whatever is said the opposite is meant. I like to tell my students this is one of their favorite ways to speak, in sarcasm, the less technical term for one of the three forms of irony, verbal irony. The other two are dramatic irony and situational irony. Dramatic irony is when the audience knows something is going to happen but the character in the story has no idea. Situational irony is when something happens to someone or something that you wouldn’t expect to happen to them such as a Fire department’s house being on fire, the last place anyone would expect to be lit a flame.

These three words are keys to identifying and exploring author’s literature and creating a successful literary analysis. Identifying is only half the work, however, the second part is being able to interpret what you have identified. Interpreting and elaborating are fundamental parts of analyzing literature. It is essential that one does not simply identify what an author has done in their writing but also explains why they did it. What purpose do it have? Why is useful in enhancing the reader’s understanding of the text? How does it improve the text as a whole? These questions always needed to be asked when analyzing a text.