How do I close read a passage from a literary text?

Close readings are an essential part of the study of English Literature. They form the basis of a lot of essay writing, exams and coursework and become particularly important if you’re thinking of studying an English Literature course at university. They can seem tricky, because of the level of attention to detail and focus on literary technique required, but they are also interesting activities which can really open up the meaning of a literary text. For the purpose of this exercise, I want to engage in a close reading of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848). The passage I have provided you with is taken from around the middle of the novel. This text is a very long, Victorian novel, but I have chosen it to show you how a close reading can make the overall reading and analysing experience more illuminating and enjoyable. With a close reading, it is important to pick out what interests you, but also what you think is important about that passage, in terms of how it effects the rest of the novel. For example, in this passage, the narrator tells us that a child ‘has crawled below into the kitchen for companionship. His mother scarcely ever took notice of him’. Whilst you may ordinarily skim over this bit of information, it is actually an interesting moment within the passage. Here is where your skills of literary analysis become valuable. In this quotation, the child ‘crawled’, and this verb tells us that the child is young enough to be crawling, so we roughly learn the age of the child. Therefore, it is surprising to learn that the child is crawling for ‘companionship’, as we would not expect a child to be searching for company. Lastly, the sentence ‘His mother scarcely ever took notice of him’ tells us a lot about the characterization of the child’s mother, prompting us to question why the mother is so neglectful. As we now know that the mother often neglects her child, this might change the way we read her character and the things we notice about her. Other narrative techniques could be analysed – for example, the tone of the writing, the imagery used, the metaphors and similes employed. It might also be important, depending on your type of assessment, to work out what is necessary for your line of argument – i.e. the thing you’re discussing in your writing, about that particular novel/poem/play. For example, this passage includes a lot of different themes – family, loneliness, commodities, money, to name a few. However, if you’re writing an essay about ‘the love of commodities and material goods in Vanity Fair’, it is helpful to draw out from the passage sentences and moments which help inform your argument particularly. If your focus was on commodities and material goods, some of the passage could be set aside – for example, the child crawling for companionship – in favour of using the moments in which Becky’s wardrobe of ‘wonderful robes’ and her ‘mystic chamber of splendour and delights’.