ABSTRACT OF THESIS




EXPANDING DEICTIC SHIFT THEORY:
PERSON DEIXIS IN CHUCK PALAHNIUK’S FIGHT CLUB

Deictic shift theory (DST) was developed as a model of the construction and
comprehension of all types of fictional narrative. With respect to the participant
structures of texts, however, DST researchers have focused their attention on deictic
shifts in third-person narratives, leaving first-person narratives unanalyzed from this
theoretical perspective. As a result, DST in its present form does not adequately account
for the variety of manipulations of a range of perspectives that may be achieved in first-
person narratives. Nor has DST been systematically applied to texts whose participant
structures undergo extensive reorganization as the result of a surprise ending or other
narrative twist.

By analyzing the deictic and referring expressions that create the participant
structure of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club, this thesis tests DST’s potential to
account for authors’ and readers’ cognitive experiences of first-person narratives with
plot twists. The analysis establishes a wider range of linguistic cues that may affect
readers’ mental representations of characters. It identifies interactions between elements
in the participant structure, including those that permit the representation of non-narrating
characters’ subjective perspectives, as well as the linguistic features that enable these
interactions. The thesis examines the effects of an author’s violations of traditional
narrative perspective constraints, and it underscores the importance, especially in DST-
motivated analyses, of recognizing the potential for interplay between general narrative
constraints and the narrative structure of a specific text. The thesis revises DST’s account
of the nature and extent of deictic shifts in first-person narratives and describes the role
deictic shifts play in fictional narratives that contain plot twists.

KEYWORDS: cognitive stylistics, deictic shift theory, Fight Club, first-person narrative,
person deixis


Anna Laura Bennett
July 25, 2005

© Anna Laura Bennett 2005

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EXPANDING DEICTIC SHIFT THEORY:
PERSON DEIXIS IN CHUCK PALAHNIUK’S FIGHT CLUB



By

Anna Laura Bennett













Dr. Greg Stump
Director of Thesis

Dr. Joyce MacDonald
Director of Graduate Studies

July 25, 2005

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THESIS









Anna Laura Bennett










The Graduate School

University of Kentucky

2005

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EXPANDING DEICTIC SHIFT THEORY:
PERSON DEIXIS IN CHUCK PALAHNIUK’S FIGHT CLUB





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THESIS
____________________________________

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of master of arts in the
College of Arts and Sciences
at the University of Kentucky


By

Anna Laura Bennett

Lexington, Kentucky

Director: Dr. Greg Stump, Professor of Linguistics

Lexington, Kentucky

2005








© Anna Laura Bennett 2005

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MASTER’S THESIS RELEASE



I authorize the University of Kentucky Libraries
to reproduce this thesis in whole or in part
for purposes of research.

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CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Introduction and Background 1
Deixis in Natural Language
3
Deixis in Fictional Narrative
5

Chapter 2: Textual Exploration 12
Standard Deictic Center Devices and the Focalized WHO
12
Representing the Subjectivity of the Focalized WHO
14
Indirect Representation of Characters’ Dialogue
15
Nonstandard Uses of Standard Deictic Center Devices
20
Second-Person Narration
21
Narrator as Focalized WHO
24
Self-Address 25
Fictional Reference
26
Reader as Focalized WHO
30
Edgework Cued by the Plot Twist
30

Chapter 3: Theoretical Implications 33
First-Person Narrative
33
Narrative Twists and Preparatory Edgework
39
Conclusion 41

Appendix 1: Deictic Center Devices That Affect the Focalizing WHO 42

Appendix 2: Standard Deictic Center Devices That Affect the Focalized WHO 43

References 45

Vita
48
iii

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CHAPTER 1
Introduction and Background
Fictional narratives that contain surprise endings or other plot twists rely on the reader’s
shock of discovery to achieve their full impact. When a first-person narrative delivers
such a twist, the effect of the surprise is often amplified. The reader of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” for example, is horrified when, in the final pages of
the short story, the extent of the protagonist’s madness is revealed: it is she who has
gnawed the bedstead, and who has worn a groove in the wall by creeping methodically
around the perimeter of the room. The first-person narration of the story heightens the
impact of the revelation, not only because all narrated events have been filtered through
the protagonist’s skewed perspective, but also because the involved reader develops a
sense of identification with the narrator that leads the reader to seek alternative
interpretations of her peculiar observations and behavior until the evidence becomes
overwhelming. Further, first-person narration strengthens the impact of a narrative
surprise because the reader and the narrator typically unravel the plot twist
simultaneously, in a sense, experiencing it together. In Charles Dickens’s Great
Expectations, the reader jumps to the same conclusions about the source of Pip’s fortune
that Pip himself does, and therefore experiences reactions similar to the character’s own
to the revelation that his mysterious benefactor is the convict Provis and not Miss
Havisham, guardian of Pip’s beloved Estella. Just as Pip reviews his interpretations of
past events and, what is more important, mentally reorganizes his relationships with other
characters, so too does the reader.

When a twist in plot development so radically shifts the relational structure
among characters, the reader must engage in a substantial cognitive reworking of the
fictional identities and relationships that have been (and are being) narrated by the text.
The twist in Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel Fight Club requires just such cognitive
reorganization. The framing device that opens the narrative introduces the two
protagonists—Tyler Durden and the unnamed first-person narrator—in the midst of a
murder-suicide plot atop a skyscraper due to explode in ten minutes. With Tyler’s gun in
his mouth, the narrator reflects that ‘all of this: the gun, the anarchy, the explosion is
1

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really about Marla Singer’, and he describes the three characters’ relationship as ‘a sort of
a triangle thing. . . . I want Tyler. Tyler wants Marla. Marla wants me. [¶] I don’t want
Marla, and Tyler doesn’t want me around, not anymore’ (4). From the beginning, then,
the reader is led to believe that the participant structure of the novel centers on this
triangle of unreciprocated emotions. The plot twist in Fight Club lies in the revelation
that Tyler—violent, charismatic, and driven by delusions of anarchic grandeur—is not a
separate person at all but the alter ego of the passive, system-invested narrator.

While it might seem that the plot twist actually simplifies the participant structure
of the narrative by collapsing a triangle into a dyad, the tension between the competing
personalities only increases after the revelation of the twist. Indeed, the ultimate
resolution of the triangle is achieved, at least in part, not by Marla’s finding out that Tyler
and the narrator are the same person but by her coming to ‘know the difference’ between
them. The expressions used by Tyler and the narrator to refer to and address each other
during their first post–plot twist “meeting” reflect this tension at the most fundamental
level of meaning:
(1)
“There isn’t a me and a you, anymore,” Tyler says, and he pinches the
end of my nose. “I think you’ve figured that out.” (155)
Tyler’s speech is important, not only because it helps to clarify the participant structure
of the novel, but also because the forms of the referring expressions he uses belie his
meaning. Even in the midst of insisting that the two are one, Tyler selects personal
pronouns that maintain the boundary between himself and the narrator. And, though
everyone now knows that the narrator and Tyler share a nose, the narrator does not
describe the physical contact as, for example, ‘I pinch the end of my own nose’. Thus the
reader must interpret (1) to mean what Tyler intends, but she also registers, albeit perhaps
at a less conscious level, that the sentence contains morphosyntactic features that
contradict its semantics.

A textual exploration of Fight Club will reveal the extent to which this tension
between the form and function of referring expressions, and more generally the
competition between interpretations of linguistic evidence, is used to complicate the
participant structure of the narrative and, in turn, to enhance the effect of the plot twist.
To understand how these expressions create—and revise—the participant structure of the
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novel, we turn first to the linguistic phenomenon of deixis and then to deictic shift theory,
a theory of cognitive deixis in narrative.
Deixis in Natural Language

From the Greek word for pointing or indicating, deixis refers to the features of
language, including verb tense and aspect, personal pronouns, and adverbs of time and
place, that depend for their full interpretation on the context of their utterance. Linguistic
expressions that possess this property of context dependence were first termed indexical
symbols by Peirce (cited in Burks 1949). Following Peirce, Burks used the distinction
between token and type to help distinguish indexical symbols, such as ‘this’, from non-
indexical symbols, such as ‘red’. Each use of a particular word in context is a token; the
class of all tokens of that word is a type. The tokens of both non-indexical and indexical
symbols have symbolic meanings, each of which is specified by a general linguistic rule
that applies to all tokens of the type. But whereas the full meaning of a non-indexical
symbol token (e.g., ‘red’ in the utterance ‘the book is red’) is contained in this symbolic
meaning, the full meaning of an indexical symbol token (e.g., ‘this’ in the utterance ‘this
is the book’) also contains the contextual information (generally, a spatiotemporal point)
of that token. Burks called the combination of symbolic meaning and relevant situational
information the indexical meaning. As Burks observed, one cannot judge the truth value
of a sentence that contains a token of an indexical symbol without knowing the token’s
indexical meaning—and whatever one must understand to be able to verify a sentence
(i.e., to judge its truth value) is precisely the meaning of that sentence.

Because the anchoring of situational information is crucial to the interpretation of
deictic expressions and the sentences that contain them, there must exist a subjective
orienting point for context-embedded discourse. Bühler (1934/1982) termed this orienting
point the origo; others have since called it the center (Fillmore 1971; Lyons 1968) or,
more specifically, the center of orientation (Rauh 1983) or the deictic center (Levinson
1983). In the primary deictic categories of person, place, and time deixis, I is understood
to be the speaker’s self, here is understood to be the speaker’s current location, and now
is understood to be the speaker’s present time. It is in relation to this speaker-centric
“zero point” that other personal, spatial, and temporal deictic expressions (in the same
3

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Document Outline

• Abstract
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Chapter 1: Introduction and Background
  • Deixis in Natural Language
  • Deixis in Fictional Narrative
• Chapter 2: Textual Exploration
  • Standard Deictic Center Devices and the Focalized Who
  • Representing the Subjectivity of the Focalized WHO
    • Indirect Representation of Characters' Dialogue
    • Nonstandard Uses of Standard Deictic Center Devices
    • Second-Person Narration
  • Narrator as Focalized WHO
    • Self-Address
    • Fictional Reference
  • Reader as Focalized WHO
  • Edgework Cued by the Plot Twist
• Chapter 3: Theoretical Implications
  • First-Person Narrative
  • Narrative Twists and Preparatory Edgework
  • Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Deictic Center Devices That Affect the Focalizing WHO
• Appendix 2: Standard Deictic Center Devices That Affect the Focalized WHO
• References
• Vita

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