ABSTRACT
This chapter directs attention to how one mode of focalization simultaneously helps convey twofold irony through dual dynamics in Katherine Mansfield’s “A Dill Pickle.” This narrative focuses on the relationship between a man and a woman, with the woman functioning as the internal focalizer for almost the entire text. If our attention is confined to the plot-based overt progression, we’ll only see the egoism of the man as the target of irony of the woman’s focalization. But when dual dynamics comes into view, the target of irony becomes much more extensive. In the covert progression, the man serves to set off the woman’s egoism as another target of irony of the woman’s own focalization and, moreover, he forms a vehicle to extend the target of irony to egoistic people at large. In this way, theme and character are greatly enriched, and our interpretive, ethical, and aesthetic judgments become differentiated and complex. What is more, a better understanding can be achieved not only of Mansfield’s inspired use of focalization but also of the potentialities of internal focalization, a mode that can convey irony against both the focalized person and the focalizer herself in two parallel narrative movements.
