Motif Examples in Short Stories: 6 Recurring Details and What They Build
Quick answer: Motif examples from Poe, Joyce, Crane, Gilman, Andersen and Mansfield: recurring sounds, objects and phrases, and how repetition turns them into meaning.
A motif is any element that recurs through a story: a sound, an object, a colour, a phrase, a gesture. On its own each appearance is small. Together the repetitions form a pattern the reader feels before they can name it, and that pattern is how short stories carry theme without stating it. A motif becomes a symbol when the pattern settles into a meaning; until then it is rhythm.
Six patterns built by repetition
The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe returns to the ebony clock in the black room every hour. Each chime stops the orchestra, the dancers freeze, then laugh at themselves and resume. By the fourth or fifth return the reader dreads the chime as much as the guests do, and the story's last chime is death.
The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe hangs bells on Fortunato's jester cap in the first description of him, and lets them jingle as he stumbles through the catacombs, jingle when he is chained, and jingle once more from behind the finished wall. The motif turns a costume into a heartbeat.
The Open Boat by Stephen Crane repeats a sentence in the correspondent's head, a complaint to the seven mad gods who rule the sea about being allowed to come this far only to drown. It recurs in slightly different forms as the men's hope rises and falls, and its last appearance is answered by the sea.
The Dead by James Joyce mentions snow in the first pages, on Gabriel's galoshes and coat, then at the window, then in Gretta's memory of Galway, then over all Ireland in the final paragraph. Each return adds cold, then distance, then death. The motif does the work of the ending before the ending arrives.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman returns to the pattern in every entry: its colour, its smell, its broken necks, its bars, its woman. The motif's changes are the plot. Nothing happens in the house except the narrator seeing the paper differently.
Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield opens with the fur taken from its box, its sad little eyes, its nose that needs sealing wax. The fur reappears in the couple's mockery and again in the last lines, back in the box, when Miss Brill thinks she hears something crying. Three appearances make the object into the woman.
How to use it in your own story
Motifs are usually discovered in revision. Read the draft for anything that already appears twice, and decide whether it deserves a third.
Common mistakes
The commonest is the motif that repeats without developing, so the reader notices the pattern and gets nothing from it. A second is over-loading, where four motifs compete and none can settle into meaning. A third is the motif announced by the narrator ('again she saw the clock'), which turns rhythm into instruction. Judges on the Writory story rubric tend to read a well-handled motif as evidence under Theme and Resonance, because it shows meaning made by structure rather than by statement.
Where readers meet it today
Modern stories that use motif well include Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, Raymond Carver's Cathedral, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Alice Munro's Runaway.
What writers can take from this
- Find the motif in your draft before you invent one.
- Three to five returns, each in a different context.
- Keep the object the same and let the pressure around it change.
- One motif per short story is enough; two if they answer each other.
- Give the final appearance real work to do.
Try it yourself
Write a 600-word story in which a specific sound (a door, a clock, a cough, a dog two streets away) is heard five times. The sound must be described identically each time, and its meaning must be different by the fifth.
Questions
What is an example of a motif in a short story?
The ebony clock in Poe's The Masque of the Red Death, which chimes each hour and stops the music. Its returns build dread until the final chime coincides with the plague's arrival.
How do you identify a motif?
Look for any concrete element that appears three or more times, and check whether its context changes. If the meaning shifts across appearances, it is a working motif; if it merely repeats, it is a tic.
What is the difference between a motif and a theme?
A theme is an idea the story is about; a motif is a concrete recurring element that carries it. Snow is a motif in The Dead; mortality is the theme it builds.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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