Abstract
Peter Carey’s ‘The last days of a famous mime’ is a short story that presents interpretative challenges. It hangs together as a text, but this coherence is minimal and has an important rhetorical effect that draws attention to the story’s literary meaning. This effect becomes the departure point for a linguistic analysis of the text, which aims to guide an interpretation of the story by focusing on the ways in which textual meanings are construed. Drawing on the systemic functional model of language, the text is analysed from the angles of cohesive harmony and theme. The analysis highlights a low degree of coherence as a central meaning, both at the level of discourse and within the fictional world. This finding leads to the interpretation of the text as a statement on the importance of social and emotional validation.
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