ABSTRACT

Literary animal representations-unlike visual representations-are inherently limited, as the medium of description is written in human language (Nelles 2001, 188, Beer 2005, 313). Yet, various literary techniques can be used in order to bypass this limitation and present nonhuman animals in human-written language authentically as possible, or at least without fully anthropomorphizing them. One of the most basic means to reduce the anthropomorphism of nonhuman animals in prose is the third-person narration mode, in which the narrator is not a character of any kind within the story being told. By restricting the usage of human language to a human narrator, this narration mode keeps the nonhuman protagonist nonverbal. While an authentic representation of nonhuman experience in literature is challenging, it becomes necessarily unachievable in fi rst-person narrative mode, in which the nonhuman protagonist is also the story narrator. In this case, the nonhuman animal inevitably uses human language and is therefore radically anthropomorphized.