The Railway Children and Their Acts of Heroism

Abstract

The Railway Children is a classic children book that has captured the attention of millions of readers of all ages. The book presents the story of three siblings, Roberta, Peter and Phyllis, whose wealthy and happy life is overturned after their father is imprisoned due to a false accusation of spying. They continue to keep up their spirits and do good for others, and it is through these children protagonists’ adventures and heroic acts. The children’s courages acts are the reasons we are interested in investigating the novel more deeply. Nevertheless, we are particularly interested in figuring out their heroism as communicated through their use of commissives. Commissive speech acts are produced when the children express their commitments to do something in the future. Their commissive acts would be studied with reference to Searle’s (1980) categorization of commissives so that we can discover the types of commissives Roberta, Peter and Phyllis utter, and we can deduce which of those acts of commissives that communicate hero functions. The theoretical framework of heroism and hero functions that we use in this study is that of Kinsella, Ritchie, and Igou (2015), whom we consider to be providing a clear model of hero functions.