Narrative Structure of Harry Potter and Philosopher’s Stone

Abstract

The phenomenal success of the Harry Potter series has not only mesmerised the general public but has also captured the attention of academia for varied reasons. The present study is an attempt to unveil the narrative structure of Harry Potter and Philosopher’s Stone by applying Barthes’ narrative codes using a Corpus based methodology. Since the rigorous analysis of big data manually is a challenging and time taking task, the researcher decided to analyse the data by using Wmatrix, a corpus tool especially designed to analyse literary texts. The narrative codes were identified by using word frequency, Parts of Speech tagging and Semantic tagging. The result of the study shows that with the help of corpus tools Proairetic, hermeneutic and cultural codes can be identified. The study also reveals the importance of Barthe’s narrative codes for the analysis of literary texts.