Focalization

Genette believes that ‘point of view’ is inadequate to expound the differences between the person who sees and the person who narrates. After years of controversy, he proposes the term ‘focalization’ to clarify this difference. Focalization focuses on the person who sees as a subjective moment of perception. Perceiving can take every character of a novel, to a higher level of subjectivity. Later, Meike Bal added new dimensions to his term. The present study, focuses on Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife. Two main characters of the novel are focalizers inside of the story whose insights are revealed through the narrative processes of the events. The internal focalization changeably shifts from mother to daughter and vice versa. This study aims to investigate the concept of character focalizer and narrator focalizer in the light of Gerard Genette’s and Mieke Bal’s narratological theory of focalization. Further, it explores the moments of focalizations of the two characters, Winnie, the mother, and Pearl, the daughter. Focalizing the moment of understanding through the improvement of the complex story is discussed, which helps the two characters reach a higher level of subjectivity to overcome their gap.

In cognitive stylistics, “deixis” is deemed one of the core linguistic elements through which both the physical and ideological stances of the participants in fictional narratives, namely the narrator and the character(-focalizer)s, are demonstrated. This study aims at investigating the cognitive functions of the different kinds of deixis, i.e., perceptual, spatial, temporal, social, textual, and compositional deixis, in The Bell (1958), a critically acclaimed novel by the British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch. Because of its special narrative discourse, in particular the use of variable internal focalization, Murdoch’s novel proves to be a proper case for exploring how deixis impacts upon the (implied) reader’s cognition of the story. Thus, utilizing a descriptive-analytic method, the present research examines the text worlds and mind styles shaped in this novel through various kinds of deixis, among other textual elements, and explores the relationship between these text worlds and the way they inform the reading process. To achieve this goal, this qualitative study draws upon the cognitive deixis theory to examine selected extracts from Dora Greenfield’s and Toby Gashe’s discourses in this novel, as two of the major character-focalizers. The findings suggest that deictic expressions serve a significant function in appreciating the characterization of the fictional personages, their relations, and consequently the narrative’s overall theme, thereby affecting and somehow directing the reading process. This mainly occurs through the reader’s cognitive pushes and pops in and out of the different layers of the narrative discourse as well as projecting the narrator’s and character-focalizers’ text worlds or deictic fields and constantly shifting among them. By foregrounding the role of deixis in narration, this study carries significant implications for cognitive stylistics of prose fictional narratives, providing a deeper appreciation of the relationships between characters and between characters and fictional settings in such texts.