An Analysis Of The Kite Runner From The Perspective Of Transitivity

Language enables us to find out what is going on around us and inside us throughbuilding a mental picture of reality, in which a clause is a structural unit. A clause canrepresent what is happening outside and inside and can also help to express a certain range ofideational meaning, experience processes, the concrete and abstract internal world, characters’own realization, and what they see and hear and think. Thus clauses have ideational function.Most of previous researches are related to themes or symbolic meaning, while little researchhas paid attention to the relation between the transitivity system and transformation ofpsychology of the character in literary works. Thereby, it is valuable to investigate how thetransitivity system indicates the personality and transformation of psychology of the character.This thesis is aimed at analyzing the full-length novel The Kite Runner from the perspectiveof transitivity system in the Systemic Functional Grammar, focusing on the transformation ofpsychology of the protagonist in the novel The Kite Runner.This thesis mainly studies three questions. The first is to study how those six transitivityprocesses distribute at each stage of the novel through transitivity analysis. The second is toexplore how the transitivity system indicates the personality and the mental state of theprotagonist by describing the reflection from the process types, participants and circumstantialelements. The third is to study what kind of transformation of psychology of the protagonist isreflected from the analysis of transitivity theory. It uses the method of quantitative analysisand the method of qualitative and descriptive analysis to carry out the specific research. The selected clauses will be divided into three stages in accordance with the progression of thestory, that is, the confusion stage, the perfidy stage and the redemption stage. And then certainselected clauses at the three stages will be analyzed according to the six types of transitivityprocesses(material process, mental process, relational process, verbal process, behavioralprocess and existential process).This thesis gives a specific analysis of selected clauses with transitivity processes, whosepurpose is to study the personality and transformation of psychology of the protagonist. Inaddition, the transitivity analysis of this thesis shows how the protagonist transforms from acoward boy to a mature adult man. The transitivity analysis of The Kite Runner helps readershave a fuller understanding of the story and the psychological journey of the protagonist. Italso extends the scope of application of transitivity system and provides a new perspective ofanalyzing The Kite Runner.