Actor Description of the Protagonists Violet and Klaus in Lemony Snickets’ Series of Unfortunate Events: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The way by which actors are described in discourse through depending on our ideologies and how we perceive them. It gives a detailed description of the entities (position, person, thing) of discourse. The research aims at exploring the ideological perspectives of presenting the orphans through the “Us versus Them” mentality. The data is limited to (4) extracts from the selected novels. These novels are “The Bad Beginning” and “The End” that are derived from “Lemony Snickets' A Series of Unfortunate Events”. These extracts are derived from the two selected novels which are written by the author Daniel Handler. The analysis involves two orphans: Violet is the eldest sister with 14 years old and Klaus is the middle with 12 years old. The model analysis involves van Dijk’s (2006, 2008) Socio-cognitive approach and ideological square was adopted. The study concluded that Violet and Klaus use strategy of actor description for the purpose of focusing on the self-representation through employing the personal pronouns "we' and 'I" as well as using certain expressions many times for the purpose of adopting their personal identity in the selected extracts of both novels.