How the Character of the Narrator Constructs a Narratee and an Implied Reader in Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Overall, this is an intriguing and well-argued text, with some minor limitations. I have made various suggestions for revision, listed below. The most important ones are minimizing shifts in tone, checking the grammar and mechanics (e.g., run-on sentences), including demonstrative quotes from the primary material that support the arguments being made at the beginning of the text, ensuring key terms are carefully defined, and including signposting.

 

Further comments:

Throughout the text, there are some places where you seem to shift from a more formal tone to a more colloquial one. I recommend that you review the text to ensure that the formality of the piece is even throughout, as these shifts can "eject" readers from the flow of reading.

While I am pleased to see your references to Hollindale's work on ideology in children's literature, I would also expect to see Stephens's work on the subject. Specifically, I would expect to see references to is 1992 book Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction and his 2011 chapter with Robyn McCallum, "Ideology in Children's Books," in Handbook of Research on Children's and Young Adult Literature (Routledge).

Line 34/35: There is a bit of an abrupt shift from line 34 to line 35 in the manuscript. It may be useful to add a segue here, such as "Yet few/no previous papers have considered the narratological structures of the novel, and in particular, none has considered the construction of narrator and reader. This paper therefore..."

Line 38: This line implies that a heterodiegetic third-person narrator must tell a story in the past tense, but while this is certainly most common, it is not a requirement. Perhaps replace parentheses with commas to avoid this implication?

There are some run-on sentences, e.g., lines 61–64. Please check for this throughout and be sure to replace commas with periods or semi-colons where appropriate.

It could be helpful for readers if you were to use literary analytical terminology when you describe what the paper will be doing in lines 67–69, e.g., "how the narrator's voice can adopt characters voices through literary devices like free-indirect discourse" or similar.

If students are considered a part of the audience, it may be worth defining what you mean by tagged and untagged text around line 71, i.e, discourse that is introduced with phrases like "he thought" or "she said"?

Line 98: missing "in": "and [in] which he himself writes"

On page 3, there are perhaps too many block quotes. They interrupt the flow of the text. Could you better integrate, e.g., the first and last block quotes, both of which are short, into your own prose?

Line 133: the semi-colon should be a comma (this, and its opposite, is a problem throughout the text--please be sure to check the use of commas, semicolons, and colons carefully throughout to ensure that they match the recommendations of the style guide being used--which I assume from the citations is Chicago author-date style or a modification thereof)

Line 135: the comma should be a semi-colon (in general, please check for semi-colon versus comma use--you are, at times, using these punctuation marks in the Norwegian way rather than the English way)

line 138: There should be a comma between "implied child reader" and "making"

It would improve the arguments made if more examples from the text of NL were included in each section. At present, there are no examples of what the author is describing regarding the sprightly narrator's dual address, for example, although demonstrative quotes are included elsewhere, to support other arguments. Providing some demonstrative quotes would greatly improve the persuasiveness of the arguments made.

Line 156: at the beginning of this section, it could be helpful to argue in more detail for how a novel within a limited omniscient narrator, who mainly accesses one character's thoughts via free indirect discourse, can be defined as polyphonic, as "poly" suggests many. For example, you could describe the term in more detail and signpost the subsections that follow so readers know what will come.

Finally, the ending is rather abrupt, with no clear conclusion. A carefully worded conclusion--even of one paragraph--would improve the text by summarising the key arguments for readers and (re)asserting the contributions the article makes to the field.

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Please see comments above.

Author Response

Thank you for your comments on my manuscript.

In addition to the corrections with line references I have also tried to add more quotations earlier in the text. I have changed the tone of the text by removing the more conversational language. I have also sought to shorten a lot of the longer sentences in an attempt to make my argument clearer, as well as providing more comprehensive definitions of certain technical terms. The introduction and each subsequent section now has larger references to the rest of the text, signposting where my argument is leading. I have also added to the conclusion of the text.

Even though I have not made reference to McCallum’s 1992 or 2011 texts, I have made brief reference to her 1999 work in how dialogue helps to create Lyra’s sense of identity through the use of the alethiometer.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you for your comments on my manuscript.

In addition to the corrections with line references I have also tried to add more quotations earlier in the text. I have changed the tone of the text by removing the more conversational language. I have also sought to shorten a lot of the longer sentences in an attempt to make my argument clearer, as well as providing more comprehensive definitions of certain technical terms. I have also taken your suggestion of using the term “I argue”. The introduction and each subsequent section now has larger references to the rest of the text, signposting where my argument is leading. I have also added to the conclusion of the text, whilst also trying to thread my argument throughout the text

I have added to the idea of an inauthentic voice by providing reference to other forms of texts for younger readers, addressing how YA fiction, which Northern Lights is some classified as, can suffer from not using a third-person narrator.

I have also added reference to Beauvais’s work. You are correct in linking the potentiality of the narratee with her work The Mighty Child, as well as making more of the argument of the text addressing innocence and experience.