NARRATIVE AND STYLISTIC REPRESENTATION OF PAIN IN GOTHIC FICTION

Abstract

The article is dedicated to investigating the palette of stylistic devices used to describe the emotion of pain in Gothic novels. A person’s life is accompanied by a significant amount of both positive and negative emotions. Pain is one of the negative emotions that plays a substantial part in existence. Taking into account the situation in which a person can occur, pain can be distinguished as physical or emotional. The methodology of studying the realization of emotions includes a complex approach, which combines traditional linguistic and conceptual approaches to studying language units. Based on the analysis of Gothic novels and thrillers, it was identified that the emotion «PAIN» is frequent for Gothic novels. The assumption was made that this fact is specified by the double nature of the main characters of the analysed novels – supernatural creatures, mainly vampires, who were once people (meaning that they felt all the emotions peculiar to ordinary people). Now they have turned into another kind of creatures, characterized by the hyperbolized feelings and understanding of reality (since all their feelings were intensified after transformation into a vampire). Pain is depicted as a reasonable creature that can be superior to a person, be more powerful, and even trick her. Efforts of different creatures (both mortal and immortal) to hide themselves from the creature-pain make it in such a way that it would be difficult to find them, which seems logical, as each creature tries to avoid damaging and painful emotions. As it was found out, the most productive way of describing pain is through epithets, as they demonstrate not only different characteristics of the pain itself but also describe the attitude of others to it and depict its peculiarities and features. The representation of pain is implemented due to the great range of stylistic devices, the dominant among which are personification, epithets, antithesis, comparison, and metaphor. All of these give an opportunity not only to implement the physical and emotional intensity of feelings but also to form the deep psychological portrait of the character.