To the Question of Egocentric Deixis: The Opening of Childhood Memoir

Abstract

Fludernik’s (1996: 13) view of narrativity in terms of experientiality makes the centre of narrative consciousness a more essential characteristic of narrative than the presence of a plot. Significantly, this consciousness – or point of view – is generated through deixis, thus, deixis is central to both the embodiment of perception and narrative comprehension. Grounded in the deictic shift theory (presented in Duchan, Bruder and Hewitt (1995); and articulated most clearly in Stockwell (2002)), the research aims at finding marked patterns of deictic shifts pertaining to the openings of childhood memoir. The literary context of the given study is limited to the Irish subgenre, and the two memoirs for analysis are Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), and Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People (2003). The application of the chosen methods to the opening segments reveals some regularities in the use of deictics, namely, a high frequency of first-person pronouns, such as chained I, my, and we as a textual indicator of intermentality, as well as pop-shifts from I to we and the obligatory shift to you. Other observed patterns include the voiding of the narrator and temporal shifts from the past to the present.