Bahan Kuliah Essay

1. The Rationale Literature and literary study is different. Literature is about a creative activity and an art. Literary study is not like a science. It is like a kind of knowledge and we need to learn it. Those are said by Austin Warren in Theory of Literature. The way to do a literary study is how we analyze the literary work. There are so many way to analyze a literary work, it depends on what we want to know about the literary work itself. There are many part of a literary work that we can choose to analyze it. We can analyze the inner part of a litarary work or want to know deeply a literary work by analyzing the outer side. It just depends on what we really want to know. A short story is one of literary works. It has the same elements like the others although the form is different. It has a theme that makes the story goes well as the writer wants to tell. A theme makes the story clearly to be read and the readers can get easily what the meaning of the story is. The theme helps us to interpret what the story means easily. Bidpai’s The Camel and His Friends has a clear theme. The theme is about a betrayal of a friendship. It is another kind of friendship theme in literary works. Friendship is usually told on the positive thing in a literary work but it tells the negative aspect of friendship. There will be a betrayal in a friendship when someone wants to get down his friend to win something and he betrays his friend to get what he wants. By knowing the theme, the moral of the story will be revealed. In the story, there is a camel that was left by his master in a jungle. Then he met the king of jungle, a lion, with his friends, a leopard, a fox, and a crow. Then they made friends in the jungle. Even though they already made friends,  they finally betrayed the camel and made him as a sacrifice for the hungry lion and his friends. It tells that someone must be careful in choosing his friends because sometimes they can be do well for us or the contrary. Theme is an important element of a literary work, especially in a short story. It influences the whole story. From the explaination above, there is a connection between theme and moral because by knowing the theme, the readers can get the moral aspect from the story. 2. Problem to Discuss The main topic of this term is about theme. It is about how the theme works in this short story. The theme of this story is a betrayal of a friendship. It was done by the new friends of a camel in this story, the were a lion, a leopard, a fox, and a crow. The theme makes it easy to understand and to interpret. The story begins with the lost camel who was left by his master in a jungle because he got fatigue. Then he met a lion, a leopard, a fox, and a crow. He made friends with them there. Although they were friends, finally the camel was killed by his friends because they were hungry. He was killed as a sacrifice for the king of jungle, the lion. The theme makes the story clear to understand and interpret. It also makes the other elements so clear to know. However, the writer still wants to know the evidences how it works on the other elements.