Agency, Gendered Psychology and Authorial Messaging in Haruki Murakami’s “The Second Bakery Attack”: A Systemic Functional Analysis

Abstract

The paper applies Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to analyse the gendered agency, psychological depth and authorial intent in The Second Bakery Attack by Haruki Murakami through the use of language. The examination is based on the three metafunctions of ideational, interpersonal and textual structure and demonstrates how transitivity, mood, modality and thematic structures place the husband and wife characters in an opposing situation. The results show that the male speaker takes the first place on the basis of clause count, but his speech is characterized by the epistemic modality and mental activity, which points to emotional ambiguity and passivity. On the other hand, the less but more decisive clauses of the wife are made up of material processes, deontic modality and imperatives, which suggest narrative control and psychological assertiveness Thematic analysis also reveals that her clauses also accord with narrative shifts which make her a textual presence even though she is marginal in the text. Such trends reinforce earlier analysis that the female characters in Murakami novels function as agents of transformation. The study confirms the importance of SFL in the criticism of literature as it reveals the ways in which authorial messages and gender ideological positions are encoded not only on a thematic level, but also on a grammatical level. The analysis gives the linguistically based interpretation of the gender processes and offers the general implications of the incorporation of SFL into feminist literary analysis.