Regarding "Vagueness" - Guilty as Charged

I think that every month I need to release a rant from my body about what’s on my mind concerning themes and literary analysis. Don’t get me wrong, I love analyzing literature, but my mindset is constantly changing regarding what I enjoy about it. I’ve been noticing what I like more and more when it comes to what I read and watch. It’s even been affecting my writing. I prefer it when a story is extremely specific and narrows the themes it’s trying to get across to the audience. It conveys more developed and interesting ideas than vague literature does. I’m going to be using that term a lot. Vague literature is a story that chooses broad narrative structures just for the sake of encasing hundreds of possible themes to remain relevant. For the sake of elaboration, in its simplest/dumbest form, vague literature looks like this: This is the story of a man (Oh he represents mankind as a whole) and this man, who’s name is withheld, (his name isn’t important because his true identity is mankind and his fear of the unknown is because of his need to control his own fate) does a literal biblical action or a forced allusion to one of Shakespeare's work to complete the story. Being a huge fan of Winesburg, Ohio, I was disappointed when I discovered some vague details regarding the Garden of Eden. Many characters sit under trees. Well I guess that that means Anderson was comparing them to Adam and Eve, and the tree houses the fruit of knowledge. The problem that I see in this is that it limits the possibilities that an author can say. I’ve spoken with peers who share this same concern. It’s as if we develop a logical pathway from the garden of eden, to a universal theme that’s kind of hackneyed “I’m looking at you, sin in the pursuit of knowledge” and as soon as we stumble upon an image that just barely resembles the allusion we’re trying to force the text to connect to, all deep thinking stops, and we immediately parrot the “universal truth” we’ve agreed on before hand. I’m guilty of doing this myself. I’m writing about this because I’m upset that I’ve done this myself. It’s lazy analysis, and I leave unfulfilled from a text. Specific stories have so many concrete details that they make it harder for a vague “truth” to finish the puzzle. This may limit some of the possible interpretations, but perhaps it’s for the better. Instead of getting a general society this and society that, I get specific themes that I may not have considered before. That is after all, the purpose of literature. To convey different truths and perspectives, not to repeat the same universal themes in altered ways. Personally, the most enjoyment I’ve received from analyzing literature comes from stories that are more developed and less vague. When an author has gone out of their way to make their work specific, they usually have more to say.