1A Sample Thesis Statements with Mapping Components for “The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day”

Here are a couple of thesis statements I came up with for my favorite story in the book. I hope they help in showing how the mapping statements "map-out" your essay structure:

#1: The story is an allegory that repudiates the all too-common “love quest,” the pursuit of an unattainable chimera that distracts us from our fear of intimacy, our stunted emotional growth,  and our self-pitying justifications for losing ourselves in endless cycles of using others for our own short-term gratification.

#2: Kirie is not so much a real person as she is a metaphor for Junpei’s Higher Self, which emancipates him from his father’s emotionally unavailable “default setting,” his pursuit of the chimera as a way of medicating his stunted emotional growth, and the forces of balance, focus, and risk-taking, an antidote to the meandering, solipsistic (self-absorbed), and seemingly “safe” path that seriously degrades and compromises Junpei’s relationships and even his art.