A Thematic Exploration of "Chapter 10" of Shelley's The Last Man using Voyant

A Thematic Exploration of "Chapter 10"

In "Chapter 10" of The Last Man, the audience deals with the fallout from Raymond and Evadne's relationship and the news of Raymond's death in Greece. To understand the organization and themes of the text more thoroughly, I plugged this chapter into Voyant. The storyline seems to be identified through Trends, but the themes are much more apparent through keywords that appears. Words such as "love," "life," "mind," and "time" appear the most, revealing key features and underlying themes within the text.

To identify major themes in the text, I started by using a simple Cirrus map to identify the most often used words. The first rendering identified words such as "Raymond" and "Perdita" as most common, so I investigated this first. I used Trends to isolate the terms "Raymond" and Perdita" in order to understand their story arc within the chapter. This visualization displayed that although the chapter began by focusing on both Raymond and Perdita, the early and middle of the chapter focused on Perdita mostly, shifting over to a focus on Raymond toward the middle and end. So, although we get to hear about both characters individually in different segments of the text, the chapter ends very much like it started: discussing both Perdita and Raymond in unison. This visualization, if used before reading, could help to guide the audience into the text, making it more easily navigable and easier to digest.

I soon realized that to identify themes, I needed to filter the names of characters out so that ideas were more prominent. The Cirrus map above is the visualization that resulted. The cirrus cloud revealed key terms such as "love," "life," "mind," and "time," nouns that tend to better reflect the themes of the text.