Summary

Argument claim hexagon model: the model breaks down arguments into six types of claim — fact, cause and effect, definition and classification, interpretation, evaluation and action.

Application to literature: while works of literature don’t make explicit arguments, they do make implicit claims about their worlds and characters, which can be analysed using the hexagon model to uncover deeper meanings.

Case studies: examples from Sons and Lovers and Waiting for Godot demonstrate how the model can reveal the psychological, social, symbolic and philosophical dimensions of a literary text in an easy-to-understand way.

Potential educational benefits: the model offers a structured approach to literary analysis, which could help students to understand how different types of reasoning are used in a text; to understand the hidden depths of the text and its inner dynamics; and to compare claims across multiple texts.

Speculative nature: the model has yet to be tested in the classroom so feedback from educators is needed to assess its effectiveness.

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A short introduction to the argument claim model

The argument claim hexagon model provides a framework for analysing arguments in terms of the six types of claim that can be made in any argument – claims of fact, cause and effect, definition and classification, interpretation, evaluation, and action.

Up until recently I had only applied the model to real world arguments. However, on a dog walk last week, I started to wonder whether it could also be applied to works of literature.

Of course, unlike a speech, a book or an article, a work of literature isn’t making an explicit argument.

However the world created within a novel or play makes implicit claims about specific aspects of that created world and the characters within it – as well as generalised claims about reality.

There are six types of claim that can be made in a literary work – or indeed any type of argument:

• claims of fact: details about the characters, what happens and the described world
• claims of cause and effect: the consequences that arise from the characters’ actions and the conditions they find themselves in
• claims of definition and classification: descriptions of what something is or how it should be categorized
• claims of interpretation: explanations of the deeper meaning of actions and choices; symbols and metaphors; patterns or motifs; and narrative arcs or character development
• claims of evaluation: judgements about what is good or bad; wise or foolish; meaningful or meaningless
• claims of action: how the underlying ideas might affect a reader’s views or behaviours.

(If you want to find out more about the argument claim hexagon model, please click here.)

I initially used ChatGPT to analyze DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and I found both analyses very interesting.

I then wondered whether they might also be useful for pupils studying particular texts for exams – and this article is the result of that thought.

I’ve included the ChatGPT analyses of Sons and Lovers and Waiting for Godot below. And then I go on to discuss the potential benefits of using the model for teaching literature.

Of course, given it’s AI, the summaries may well contain inaccuracies or misconceptions. However I’ve included them here to give an idea of what an argument claim hexagon analysis of a work of literature can look like. And I’m sure most English teachers would want to create their own analyses tailored to the needs and existing knowledge of their class.

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An analysis of DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers

🧾 1. Claims of Fact

What is true or observable

These are the verifiable, surface-level truths in the novel’s world. Lawrence carefully grounds his story in a recognizable socio-economic and psychological reality.

Key Fact Claims:

• The novel is set in late 19th to early 20th century Nottinghamshire, in a mining community.
• Paul Morel is the third of four children in a working-class family.
• His father, Walter Morel, is a miner; his mother, Gertrude, is more educated and emotionally refined.
• Gertrude becomes emotionally estranged from her husband and redirects her affection to her sons, especially Paul.
• Paul has relationships with two women, Miriam and Clara, but fails to commit to either.
• Gertrude becomes terminally ill and dies after Paul assists her in a morphine-assisted death.

Implication:
These facts form the literal framework of the story—but they are also the starting point for Lawrence’s deeper psychological and social commentary. Everything else (cause, interpretation, evaluation, etc.) arises from this real-world setting.

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🔁 2. Claims of Cause and Effect

What leads to what

Lawrence structures the novel to show how personal and social circumstances drive character behavior and inner conflict.

Key Cause and Effect Claims:

• Gertrude’s disappointment in her husband → causes her to overinvest in her sons, especially Paul → which creates emotional entanglement.
• Paul’s emotional dependence on his mother → inhibits his ability to form autonomous romantic relationships.
• The industrial environment → creates a sense of existential and creative suffocation for Paul and his mother.
• Miriam’s religious idealism and Clara’s sexual liberation → both fail to provide Paul with the emotional integration he seeks → because of his unresolved mother-complex.

Implication:
Cause and effect in Sons and Lovers is mostly psychological and relational. Characters are not acting freely—they are often responding to deeper, unexamined forces (class, trauma, gender roles, desire). This reflects Lawrence’s interest in psychoanalysis and emotional determinism.

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🗂️ 3. Claims of Definition and Classification

What something is or how it should be categorized

Lawrence challenges the conventional definitions of relationships, identity, and genre.

Key Definition and Classification Claims:

• The novel is a bildungsroman—a coming-of-age story—but not it’s just about growth: it’s about the inability to grow out of certain emotional entanglements.
• Paul’s relationship with his mother can be defined as Oedipal—not in the sensational Freudian sense, but in terms of emotional over-identification and possessiveness.
• The novel redefines motherhood—not as nurturing, but as a complex, possessive force.
• The men and women in the novel are not clear-cut archetypes. Paul is neither a rebel nor a romantic hero; he is emotionally fractured. Miriam and Clara are not simply “pure” and “sensual” opposites—they are both limited by their own needs and ideals.

Implication:
Lawrence plays with definitions to destabilize traditional roles. He shows that people don’t fit easily into categories. This complexity invites the reader to question social and emotional labels.

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🧠 4. Claims of Interpretation

What something means

This is where the emotional and symbolic depth of the novel emerges. Lawrence is not just telling a story—he is trying to say something about the human condition.

Key Interpretation Claims:

• The story is not about romance or ambition—it’s about the struggle for emotional independence.
• Gertrude’s “love” is a kind of emotional vampirism—she needs to possess her sons to fulfill her own lost dreams.
• Paul’s artistic gifts are symbolic of his potential to escape—but they are ultimately undermined by his emotional entrapment.
• The failure of Paul’s relationships with women is not about them being wrong for him—it’s about his inability to love freely.
• The novel’s depiction of industrial life is not just realism—it’s a metaphor for spiritual and emotional dehumanization.

Implication:
Lawrence interprets the psychological interior of people in a time of massive social change. He’s showing how love, art, and identity are all under pressure from family dynamics and class culture.

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⚖️ 5. Claims of Evaluation

What is good, bad, desirable, tragic, etc.

Lawrence offers powerful judgments—not always explicitly, but through tone, consequences, and the fate of his characters.

Key Evaluation Claims:

• The mother-son relationship, while deeply loving, is ultimately destructive.
• The working-class world is rich in texture but emotionally limiting—especially for those with artistic or spiritual aspirations.
• Women’s roles are shown to be narrow and painful, whether they are submissive (Miriam) or rebellious (Clara).
• Paul’s artistic sensitivity is precious but fragile—he cannot sustain it in a world that does not nurture it.
• The novel itself values psychological truth over conventional morality—Paul assists his mother’s death, and this is not condemned.

Implication:
Lawrence’s evaluations are tragically ambivalent—he sees beauty in love and art, but also the way they become distorted by society and family. There are no easy “heroes” or “villains” in this moral landscape.

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🚦 6. Claims of Action

What should be done

While Sons and Lovers doesn’t offer a didactic message, it does imply certain imperatives for emotional and social life.

Key Action Claims:

• Individuals must strive for emotional autonomy—to be free from destructive family bonds.
• Society must create space for emotional, artistic, and sexual self-expression—or else people will become broken or repressed.
• Men and women must find new ways of relating that transcend traditional gender roles and power dynamics.
• People must confront their inner psychological realities—even when painful—in order to grow.

Implication:
Lawrence is asking readers to live more authentically, more consciously. His vision is not utopian—but it is existentially urgent. There is a moral core to the novel: we must become more honest with ourselves and others, or suffer.

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🧩 Final Thoughts: The Argument Claim Hexagon in Motion

Taken together, the claims form a dynamic system of meaning. Here’s how they build on each other:

• Fact: Paul is enmeshed in a suffocating family dynamic.
• Cause and Effect: His psychological and romantic development is warped by this.
• Definition: His love is not “normal” but something deeper and darker.
• Interpretation: His life symbolizes the crisis of modern emotional life.
• Evaluation: This is both tragic and telling of larger social flaws.
• Action: We must seek freedom through emotional truth and new forms of relationship.

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An analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

🧾 1. Claims of Fact

What is true or observable

Claims about what is, based on observable elements in the play.

• Two men, Vladimir and Estragon, wait by a tree for someone named Godot.
• Godot never arrives, though his coming is expected.
• The same basic sequence of events occurs over two acts: waiting, discussions, the arrival and departure of Pozzo and Lucky, a message from Godot’s boy.
• Time is ambiguous and cyclical; days blend without clear markers of change.

Support from text: Repetitive dialogue, minimal plot progression, and uncertain time frame (e.g., “Was I sleeping while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now?”).

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🔁 2. Claims of Cause and Effect

What leads to what

These claims explain how or why something happens, often revealing characters’ motivations or existential consequences.

• Cause: Estragon and Vladimir believe Godot will give them purpose, salvation, or direction.
  Effect: They remain in a state of inaction, passive and paralyzed.
• Cause: Absurdity of existence and lack of clear meaning.
  Effect: Endless waiting, cyclical behavior, existential confusion.
• Cause: Reliance on external authority (Godot).
  Effect: Abdication of personal agency.

The cause-and-effect logic often breaks down intentionally, reflecting absurdism: there is no certain cause for anything, and effects are arbitrary or meaningless.

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🗂️ 3. Claims of Definition and Classification

What something is or how it should be categorized

These claims help define what things are and puts instances into categories.

• Waiting is redefined as the central human condition rather than a temporary action.
• Godot functions as a symbol—possibly for God, hope, purpose, or an unreachable ideal—but is never defined clearly.
• Vladimir and Estragon represent the everyman: humans stripped of identity, purpose, and history.
• Pozzo and Lucky exemplify power dynamics and dependency, with fluctuating roles and identities.
• The play itself is classified as an example of Theatre of the Absurd—a form that defies traditional plot, character, and meaning.

Beckett challenges standard classifications, encouraging the audience to question what things mean when stripped of narrative conventions.

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🧠 4. Claims of Interpretation

What something means

These offer explanations or meanings, often subjective, drawn from the facts of the play.

• The act of waiting without resolution mirrors the human search for meaning in a meaningless world.
• Godot’s absence suggests that the things we wait for—God, salvation, truth—may not exist or may be perpetually deferred.
• The repetitive, circular structure indicates that life itself may be repetitive and void of progress.
• Dialogue laced with humor and nonsense highlights the absurdity of human communication and consciousness.

The play is a metaphor for the human condition: uncertain, passive, reliant on illusions, yet strangely enduring.

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⚖️ 5. Claims of Evaluation

What is good, bad, desirable, tragic, etc.

These assess value, worth, or significance—what is good, bad, better, worse, meaningful, or meaningless.

• Implied evaluation of existence: Human life is portrayed as bleak, purposeless, and filled with futile repetition—yet strangely persistent.
• Evaluation of action vs. inaction: Inaction is critiqued not as laziness, but as a condition humans fall into when deprived of meaning or direction.
• Evaluation of traditional structures: The play implicitly devalues conventional narrative, authority, and religious promise by refusing to deliver resolution.
• Moral evaluation: The characters are not judged; instead, the lack of moral clarity is part of the play’s philosophical stance.

Beckett seems to imply that while life may lack traditional meaning, there is still something poignant—even noble—about continuing to wait, to speak, to persist.

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🚦 6. Claims of Action

What should be done

These are claims about what should be done.

• The play avoids clear action claims, reflecting its existential worldview.
• Implied action: Accept the absurd condition; endure without illusion.
• Rejection of action: Every time Vladimir and Estragon consider leaving, they don’t (“Let’s go.” “We can’t.” “Why not?” “We’re waiting for Godot.”).
• Beckett offers no prescriptive answers; instead, the play dramatizes the paralysis of seeking direction in a directionless world.

The absence of action claims is itself a statement about the difficulty—and perhaps futility—of decisive action in a meaningless universe.

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🧩 Summary Table

Claim Type	Example or Analysis
Fact	Two men wait for Godot; he never comes.
Cause and Effect	Waiting causes paralysis; belief in Godot leads to inaction.
Definition and Classification	Waiting redefined as existence; Godot as undefined hope; play as absurdist drama.
Interpretation	The play reflects the human search for meaning amid absurdity.
Evaluation	Life is bleak and repetitive, yet persistence is subtly affirmed.
Action	No clear action proposed; the play questions the possibility of meaningful action.

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Some potential benefits of using the model for teaching literature

Applying this model to the teaching of literature is completely new so no one has yet put it into practice. However, here are some of the potential benefits that I imagine teachers might get from using the model. I will update this section with any feedback I receive.

1. The model turns turns textual analysis into a structured process. Each claim type provides a different type of lens into the world of a novel or play:

• claims of fact allow the basic facts to be stated
• claims of cause and effect reveal motivations, consequences and psychological or social dynamics
• claims of definition and classification identify and clarify the definition and categories (e.g., identity, genre, roles) that frame the work
• claims of interpretation opens up symbolic, thematic and conceptual meanings
• claims of evaluation identify the underlying values implied in the text
• claims of action can start a dialogue about the impact the text might have on the reader’s life.

And having the six different claim types allows students to break their analysis down into six smaller, more specific questions.

3. The model can help reveal the hidden depths of a text. It moves the analysis from more basic questions about “What happens?” or “What does this symbolize?” to more complex claims about major themes like life, identity, power, time, social relationships, morality and meaning.

4. The model can help reveal the inner dynamics of a text. The model encourages students to look not just at what happens (fact) but at:

• why it happens (cause and effect),

• what it means (interpretation),

• how it’s judged (evaluation), and

• what kind of thing it is (definition/classification).

This allows students to understand a text not as a flat series of events but as a dynamic system being driven forward by the actions and reactions of characters.

5. The model could help students build a comparative map of claims across multiple texts. The model might assist students to start identifying both the similarity and contrast in the types of claims made by different authors and genres.

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Conclusion

As I’ve explained, the application of this model to teaching remains speculative. I would be very interested to hear from any English teachers who can see the value in this approach or who actually use it in their teaching. Please contact me either through the Contact Form or via X.