CRITICAL ANALYSIS ON A NARRATIVE DISCOURSE: FOX 8 BY GEORGE SAUNDERS

Critical Discourse Analysis is an analytical method applied to literary and other discourses. Its goal is to identify the explicit or implicit ideological elements in the discourse while also attempting to understand the intended action of the author because a fundamental idea and ideological knowledge are embedded in every discursive structure, and every discourse result in an action. Fox 8, a story with an animal narrator, is the product of the extraordinary imaginative talents of George Saunders. It is an unordinary story with its title and linguistic features. It is narrated with a sentimental quality that evokes pity or sadness. Narrator and main story person Fox 8 is a special fox. He is a dreamy and curious fox. He learns to speak Yuman (human) language from sitting outside a window as a mother reads bedtime stories to her kids. The fox misspells many of the words, and the story begins by apologizing to the reader about his misspellings. But Fox 8’s language is often very funny, and the reader soon becomes accustomed to the linguistic malapropisms Saunders uses in representing the contemporary American idiom such as “I woslike: Fox 8, crazy nut, when sun goes down, werld goes dark, skedaddle home”; “Dude, chek me out”; “I was fast and nated”. Fox 8 is essentially about the damage done to animals’ natural habitats and their extinction as a result of humans destroying forests and building shopping malls in their place. In this study, while analyzing the counter-discourse produced by George Saunders through Fox 8 story within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, the abuse of power and those who are abused will be determined, and the inequality in the ecosystem will be revealed and questioned. CDA is primarily an analysis method that examines how social power abuse and inequality are realized, reproduced, legitimized or resisted in the social context through text and discourse. Its goal is to identify the explicit or implicit ideological elements in the discourse while also attempting to understand the intended action of the author. Through this analysis, it was tried to emphasize that people who do not see nature as an integral part of the social structure, who do not accept that all living things have the same basic rights and who think that they have unlimited rights over nature, abuse their power despite constantly producing discourses about the protection of the ecosystem. The action that the author wants to carry out through his literary discourse is determined as ‘trying to reshape the social structure by creating awareness while warning people that animals whose natural habitats are destroyed will have to migrate to areas where people live in order to find food and that their species will become extinct and that humans will be the ones who will suffer the most from the disrupted ecological balance’. In the story narrated through the eyes of a fox who teaches humanity a moral lesson about man, who is the enemy of nature and who ruthlessly harms nature, Saunders’ message sounds like the kind of advice that humanity needs right now, in Fox 8’s misspelled words: “If you want your Storys to end happy, try being niser.”