Stylistic Analysis of Coelho’s novel The Alchemist

Abstract

Style can be defined as the way language is used in a given context. Literary style can be defined as the linguistic patterns chosen by a particular author intentionally or unintentionally among all of the other options that are not chosen by her/him. The focal point of the study is to do a stylistic analysis of The Alchemist (1993), written by famous Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho, which is the most influential novel with its profound thoughts and remarkable artistry. The novel has a unique narrative structure and profound symbolic meaning. As the research is theoretical, analytical, and descriptive in nature, close reading text-based analysis is applied in the analysis of the novel. The theoretical framework for the present study is a stylistic model based on linguistic and stylistic features proposed by Leech and Short (2007) that have been applied. They described a list of different categories; lexical categories, grammatical categories, figures of speech, coherence, and cohesion, but the present study focused on only two categories; lexical categories and grammatical categories. The researcher used a “mixed approach” for the study. The researcher used a secondary source of data collection. The present study used a non-random sampling design. Thus, in this study, the researcher has done a stylistic analysis of the novel and has presented how academic readers can better understand the writer’s use of different literary elements and how meanings are constructed from a specific novel to reveal its themes.