The most common contemporary understanding of theme is an idea or point that is central to a story, which can often be summed in a single word (for example, love, death, betrayal).
Themes often explore historically common or cross-culturally recognizable ideas, such as ethical questions, and are usually implied rather than stated explicitly.
[5] An example of this would be whether one should live a seemingly better life, at the price of giving up parts of one's humanity, which is a theme in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
Its use in Scheherazade's Arabian Nights demonstrates how the technique can result to the unification of the constituent members of story cycles.
David Rhoads, Joanna Dewey, and Donald Michie identify several verbal threads in their seminal narrative-critical study of the Gospel of Mark.
According to David Pinault, the overarching theme of that tale, in which a group of travelers roam the desert in search of ancient brass artifacts, is that "riches and pomp tempt one away from God".
These include a tale recorded in an inscription found in the palace of Kush ibh Shaddad; a story told by a prisoner about Solomon; and an episode involving Queen Tadmur's corpse.