A Stylistic Analysis of the Lexical Parallelism in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and Leila Aboulela's The Kindness of Enemies

Abstract

The main aim of this study was to analyze the use of lexical parallelism in the novels; The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy and The Kindness of Enemies(2015) by Leila Aboulela using quantitative and qualitative methods. This study analyzed the types and functions of lexical parallelism used by the authors. It also investigated the common themes of the two novels which were extracted through the use of lexical parallelism and how the authors agreed and differed in introducing the themes. The first chapter is an introduction to the thesis. It dealt with the meanings of lexical parallelism and with the methodologies, which would be used to analyze the novels under study. It also showed the main aim and the significance of the study. It included a brief summary for the context of the novels; The God of Small Things and The Kindness of Enemies. In the second chapter, a review of literature of the study was given on the previous foregrounding and parallelism studies and the models which were employed in this study. In the third chapter, I provided the methodology and the definition of parallelism which were adopted in the analysis and discussion chapter. In chapter four, the method of the study was applied on the repeated words, phrases and sentences in the novels. In this chapter, the frequencies of the types of lexical parallelism in both novels were mentioned. I chose common themes in both novels to show how parallelism was applied by the authors to present these themes. In the final chapter, a general conclusion was provided, and recommendations for further research.