Peter and Wendy and Narratological Point of View: A Stylistic Analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14456/jlapsu.2023.17Keywords:
narrative point of view, modality, children’s literature, cognitive stylistics, Peter and WendyAbstract
Acclaimed as a classic of children’s literature, James Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911) displays a theme of eternal youth through the protagonist's heartless characteristics. Although the story has intrigued a worldwide audience due to fantastical elements and memorable characters, the narrative complexity of the story has been mostly critiqued based on psychological and positivistic literary criticism, but stylistic perspectives have not been stressed. This study focuses on the relationship between the narrative structure and the narrator’s reliability, controversially articulated by literary scholars and readers. The objectives are to analyze the stylistic point of view employed through its composite narrative and to discuss how the results contribute to the narrator’s psycho-pathography and ideology transmission. This study applies Simpson’s (1993) narrative point of view and Leech and Short’s (2007) speech and thought presentation to investigate the ontological distance of the obscure narrator. The results show that the narrative point of view is sporadically ambivalent, based on the shifting shading of modalities. Although the narrative slippage leads to sceptic reliability, ideology transmission remains unaffected because the narrator’s authoritativeness is copiously enacted. Employing the stylistic framework to demonstrate the sophisticated point of view offers bona fide facets to literary criticism where linguistic evidence is of significance for interpretive discussion.
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