Жолобов С.И.

Нижегородский государственный лингвистический университет, Россия

Analysing a Literary Text

The process of reading involves a great deal of creativity on the part of the reader. It is due to the fact that he/she does not receive from the writer his/her perception of reality but only a hint about it. Consequently what the reader has to do is to reconstruct the perception that originates from the writer’s mind. However, the reconstructed perception cannot be an exact replica of the original, which can be explained by the fact that the writer and the reader are never identical – they are always different personalities whose experience and qualities can at best only overlap. Thus the process of reading, just like the process of writing, is of a creative nature: the reader is also expected to be an imaginative person.

The reader’s purpose in analysing and interpreting a literary text is first of all to draw as much information as possible from it and then to explain the meaning of it all to others. What is of great importance here is that the reader must necessarily relate content to form. In other words, it should be explicitly shown what linguistic and literary devices the writer employs to render the content of a particular text.

Given below is a set of guidelines for analysis and interpretation of a literary text. They can also serve as guidelines for assessing a student’s presentation.

The first thing the reader must be quite clear about is the setting that the writer establishes. The questions to answer here are as follows: Where and when does the action take place? Does the setting create a particular mood or certain expectations? Is the setting a symbol for an important idea that the writer wants to convey?

The story may or may not have clear indications of setting. In the former case the text makes a reference to a particular place or time. In one of the scenes of R. Aldington’s “Death of a Hero”, there is a place name – London, which makes it quite clear where the action is laid. Also, in the same scene the exact time of the action is referred to – June and July 1914. However, this is not always the case. There are often no clear indications of place and time. For instance, in the story “The Cheat’s Remorse” by M. Callaghan, New York, where the action is set, is not mentioned. But there is a clue in the text pointing to this city: “...he was broke, his shirts were in a hand laundry on Twenty-sixth Street...” The story “The Dreamer” by H. H. Munro does not include a reference to the time of the action. But the description of the way characters are dressed makes it possible for the reader to infer the time of the action – the beginning of the 20^th century.

The next dimension to be commented on is the plot of a story. Here is a checklist of points to consider: What is the plot structure of the story? How does each of the plot parts contribute to the whole of the story? What do you learn from each of the plot parts about the events depicted, about the characters involved in them, about the motives for the characters’ behaviour, about their ideas, feelings, attitudes and personalities? What events mark the introduction and the resolution of the central conflict? What is the meaning of the resolution of the central conflict?

Then comes characterization. When analysing a character, the reader should ask himself/herself such questions as: How does the writer reveal what a character is like (through his/her appearance, words and actions, background, motives, relationships with other characters, involvement in the central conflict)? Does a character change in the course of the work? If so, how and why does he/she change?

An indispensable part of any analysis and interpretation is the discussion of the point of view from which the story is told. Here are the questions to deal with: Is the story told from the first-person or from the third-person point of view? What effect does the point of view have on the way the reader experiences the narrative?

In a first-person narrative, the narrator plays the role of writer openly, using such pronouns as ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’. In this case, he/she is a character in the story. The first-person point of view is almost always limited. This means that the narrator does not know the thoughts and feelings of any of the other characters in the story and can offer only his/her own interpretations of their words and actions. Even though a writer narrates a personal experience, however, the narrator who tells the story is not truly identical with the author who writes it. The narrator is a persona, more or less distinct from the author. Thus the narrator may be made deliberately and comically inept – a trick humorous writers often employ – or the narrator may be drawn smarter and braver than the author actually is. Therefore in this kind of literary text the narrator is a character in his/her own right. A first-person narrator may be the central character to whom major things happen. Alternatively, a first-person narrator may be an observer standing on the edge of the action and watching what happens to others.

A third-person point of view, on the other hand, requires that the narrator should avoid all explicit reference to himself/herself. A third-person narrator never refers to himself/herself as ‘I’ but uses third-person pronouns such as ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’, ‘his’, ‘her’, ‘them’ to talk about the characters. The narrator is not a character in the story but tells it from outside the action. Here the writer seems to disappear, hidden completely behind his/her characters. The reader knows that an author exists because a story implies a storyteller. But that presence must be guessed; one never actually observes it.

A writer using the third-person point of view may decide that the narrator will know what one of the characters thinks and feels but only what the others say and do. Everything is viewed from a particular character’s perspective. In this case, the narrator speaks from the limited third-person point of view. If a third-person narrator is not limited but knows the thoughts and feelings of every character, the narrator is said to be omniscient, or ‘all-knowing’. What happens in a story like this is that the narrator periodically switches from one character to another, identifying himself/herself with one of them so as to be able to look at the events through a particular character’s perception.

Equally important is the tone of the story. Tone is the general feeling or attitude conveyed in a work of literature and it divides into a number of strands: the writer’s attitude towards the subject, characters, the reader and himself/herself. Tone is manifested in the language of a literary work.

Another prominent aspect of a literary text is the theme or themes explored in it. It is not enough just to state the themes; the interpreter should necessarily expand on how they relate to the story being analysed. It must be unambiguously shown how they are revealed through elements of a work such as the title, the setting, the characters and the resolution of the plot.

Finally, it is the writer’s style that is to be discussed. The main feature of style is distinctiveness, which is manifested in the choice of language that the author makes. While examining the style of a literary text, the reader should start by making lists of key words, grammar patterns and imagery employed by the author. Then these items must be analysed in terms of form and meaning with a view to finding out whether there are any salient regularities in the way they are used in the text. And last of all the interpreter should draw valid inferences from the way the items are contextualized and should offer his/her ideas as to what they contribute to different dimensions of the literary work, such as setting, plot, characters, tone and themes.

In conclusion, we cannot stress enough the need to be creative and imaginative when analysing and interpreting a literary text. The reader must bear in mind that there is no foolproof method for explicating texts; in fact, any technique will fail if it is too rigid. What he/she is expected to do is to use his/her imagination to the full in order to come up with fresh and novel ideas about the literary text he/she is dealing with. Involved in this process of explication is a combination of our language competence, our knowledge of the world and our responsiveness to literature. And it is these aspects of a student’s presentation that are to be evaluated.