The polymodal narrative discourse of Roald Dahl in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"

Abstract

In this article we study one of the basic constituents of children and youth narrative discourse based on the consideration of the existence of such constituents as susceptible of being analysed and as differentiators of non-literary discourse. As it has been done throughout the history of discourse analysis, in trying to frame the integrating elements of the literary text, the discursive constants -the functions, the sequences and the characters- have been discriminated. Although studies on these continuous are insufficient and difficult to dissociate in order to discern the particular essence of the literary universe, they are certainly necessary. Taking into account such limitations and adding the complexity of the special nature of the recipients to whom the type of texts in this article are addressed, it is relevant to discriminate the linguistic or paralinguistic resources employed, by which the young reader understands the content of what is narrated in them. These resources allow us to shape the rhetorical procedure that enables narrative elocution, that is, those that define the mode of discourse, the time of the narration, and finally, the narrative voice. Thus, in this article we will offer the analysis of the modes of child and youth discourse represented in a novel by Roald Dahl. The aim of this study is to demonstrate the existence of literary polymodality in contemporary children and young people narrative as one of the identifying factors of its literary quality. Such a nature demolishes the idea of compositional simplicity and of scarce literary value that has accompanied literature for children and youth for decades.

To carry out this study, a summary of previously presented theories will be tackled, as well as the method of narratological analysis designed by Gerard Genette in his work Figures III (1972) -in his Spanish translation Figures III (1989)- which will be applied to the novel by the English author Roald Dahl, Charlie and the chocolate factory (1964), by means of the discrimination of fragments which try to show each one of the modal variations and their subsequent interpretation.