Maggie Stiefvater's The Words And Worlds Of Literary Narratives: Analysis

The function of cognitive literary theory is to use literary narratives in order to understand how the reader encounters and understands text as well as how the brain interacts and remembers narratives. In other words, it seeks to answer why human beings are so drawn to creating and propagating narratives either orally through communication or via written literature, which suffuse every aspect of our lives. Much of the narratives that have been studied for this purpose include complex and classic literary works whose narrative strategies compel the reader to become immersed in the fictional world created by the author. Also of frequent study are mystery and thriller novels in order to understand how gaps function in narratives and how authors

In Maggie Stiefvater’s novel, The Scorpio Races, she plays with narrative focalization using two alternating narrations from the point of view of two separate characters. The two main characters of the novel, Puck Connelly and Sean Kendrick, interact with the inhabitants of their island home, Thisby, during the same timeframe. Stiefvater provides an alternating narration so that over other chapter is narrated by the same individual. However, as the plot draws these two characters closer together, the reader is able to glimpse the characters through the eyes of the other. In having the narration from both points of view, the reader is privy to experiences and feelings that neither character is aware of in the other. These two narrators, with different speaking tones and narrative styles, enable the reader to experience what Kuzmičová terms the verbal presence, or words, of a text. This verbal presence exists as the words of the text are voiced in the mind of the reader as spoken by the narrator of the story (Kuzmičová 110). In having two separate narrators, Stiefvater has the reader encounter the verbal presence of different characters, providing the reader with more information than would be otherwise available. However, this also ramps up the tension within the novel, as the reader is privy to the

On one hand, the reader has direct evidence of the character’s mental states from the narrator that they are reading, which provides the reader with direct access to the character’s thoughts and emotions. However, the reader’s understanding of the characters is tempered by the narration and their interactions with the other characters as presented through the other narrator. For example, the reader’s first introduction to the narrative style of the text, which coincidentally also is the reader’s first portrayal of the Scorpio Races, comes through Sean’s narration as a ten-year old boy watching his father die on the beach. He discusses the fear on his father’s face, and the experience of being hailed by the other riders as if he belongs on that beach. When he describes riding a capall, it is not with the fear that the horse might eat him; instead he describes riding with pride and adulation. He states, “I have ridden him, this capall. On his back, the wind beating me, the ground jarring me, the sea spraying our legs, we never tire” (3). This is a vastly different depiction of the capaill uisce compared to Puck’s understanding who pictures them as monsters, the killer of her parents. Even her first description of Sean differs, producing a jarring narrative effect as the focalization