Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

Propp’s function
Narrative event in 
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
1. Hero absents himself
Harry Potter [Hero] has been orphaned and is forced to live
in the home of his cruel aunt and uncle, the Dursleys.
2. Hero receives 
Harry is told by the Dursleys 
not
to go to Hogwart’s school
interdiction
of wizardry
3. Interdiction is violated
Harry goes to Hogwart’s school of wizardry
6. Villain attempts to 
Unknown to all, Voldemort [Villain] has taken over the body
deceive or to take 
of Professor Quirrel.
possession
8. Villain harms 
Harry learns that Voldemort has killed his parents.
member of
Hero’s family
9. This harm made 
Harry embarks on a mission to recover the philosopher’s
known: Hero goes/ 
stone.
is sent on a mission
12. Hero gets helper and/
Harry receives (unexpectedly) a top-of-the-range broomstick,
or magical agent
a Nimbus 2000.
25. Difficult task set for 
Harry is charged with retrieving the ‘golden snitch’ in a 
Hero
game of Quidditch.
14. Hero uses magical 
Harry uses the Nimbus 2000 in the Quidditch game.
agent.
26. Task is accomplished.
Harry successfully retrieves the golden snitch.
16. Hero and Villain join
Harry and Voldemort join combat.
in combat
17. Hero is branded
Harry has acquired a lightning-shaped scar through an 
earlier encounter with Voldemort.
28. False Hero is exposed
Quirrel exposed as the host of Voldemort.
29. False Hero is 
Quirrel transformed into dust during the combat.
transformed
18. Villain is defeated
Voldemort is defeated.
30. Villain is punished
Voldemort forced to leave the body of his dead host.
19. Initial misfortune is 
In the Hogwart’s school competition, Harry’s house
set right.
Gryffindor is reinstated above their cheating rivals Slytherin.
20. Hero returns home
Harry leaves Hogwart’s for the summer recess.

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of the relevant plot development and character role as realised in the film. It is notice-
able that certain of the narrative functions in the film are slightly out of kilter with
the sequence developed in Propp. For example, Harry’s parents have been killed by
Voldemort prior to the first action of the film, yet Harry only later discovers this and
to some extent relives the episode through flashback. Nonetheless, the sometime
reordering and indeed repetition of the core narrative functions is precisely what the
Proppian model seeks to accommodate, and in actual narrative discourse the use of
flashback, prevision and other devices are markers of individuality in the story (see
B7). It is interesting also that in neither of the two films are 
all
of Propp’s thirty-one
functions drawn upon, but as we have seen, not all functions are needed to create 
a coherent narrative. What the identification of features shows, especially in the
context of the 
Harry Potter
checklist, is that many of the archetypical patterns that
inform fairy stories are alive and well in certain genres of contemporary narrative.
Admittedly, both film texts examined here are magical, mythical adventures much
in the vein of the folktale, so the success with which the Proppian model can accom-
modate 
all
narrative genres remains to be proven. Nonetheless, a narrative genre like
the Western, whether embodied in film or prose media, seems an obvious candidate
for scrutiny, as might the romance, the detective story or the science fiction story. If
anything, the import of Propp’s model is not to suggest that all narratives are the
same, but rather to explain in part why all narratives are different.
The focus in the next unit along this thread explores narrative through another
type of textual medium, the narrative of everyday spoken interaction. The unit below
concentrates on narrative as discourse and assesses some of the developments that
have taken place in the use of transitivity for narrative analysis.
STYLE AND TRANSITIVITY
Writing about narrative, the American novelist Henry James once posed a pair of
rhetorical questions: ‘What is character but the determination of incident? What is
incident but the illustration of character?’. The integration of ‘character’ and ‘inci-
dent’ may at first glance seem a curious alignment, but closer scrutiny suggests that
James’s formula serves very much as a template for the analysis of 
transitivity
in
narrative. In the model proposed in unit A5, it was suggested that a principal mode
of narrative characterisation is the transmission of ‘actions and events’. This mode
refers to the way character is developed through and by the semantic processes and