Linguistic and Psychological Portraits of Adolescent Characters in Valentyn Berdt's Story “It all Starts at 13”

Abstract

The linguistic portrait of a character is part of the literary text structure; it is its organic part. The article highlights linguistic portraiture as a set of lexical and stylistic means used by the author to describe the appearance, facial expressions, gestures, speech, character traits, dynamics of thoughts, feelings, and experiences of the characters in a work of art.

The purpose of the article is to analyze the linguistic stylistic devices used for creating the linguistic and psychological portraits of teenage characters in Valentin Berdt's story “It All Starts at 13”. A specific feature of a psychological portrait is that it may not contain a description of appearance at all but only fragmentary descriptions of the character's mental characteristics, character traits, and disposition. This is the method of portraying characters used in V. Berdt's story "It All Starts at 13", in which descriptions of appearance are almost absent. The reader is provided with the opportunity to imagine the character's appearance based on the description of his behavior, way of thinking, and statements.

The story is dominated by a dynamic, situational portrait of the protagonist, who develops, grows, changes, and fantasizes. The writer makes extensive use of line portraits, constantly emphasizing the leading detail or character trait. In the story, such a detail is the hobby of the main character, and at the same time the narrator's, passion for computers. His speech is characterized by the use of special vocabulary and slang from the IT sphere. Epithets, metaphors, similes, school slang, and colloquial vocabulary are most often recorded among the stylistic means of creating psychological portraits of teenagers.

V. Berdt carefully selects words to describe the behavior, its changes, and the manner of communication of the 13-year-old characters of the story. Depicting the characters, the writer emphasizes such a recurring artistic detail as a smile or laugh, which is a feature of the schoolchildren's environment. They spend their holidays carefreely.  The character of the cheerful and intelligent girl Oksana stands out the most among them. In the story, special attention is paid to tactile sensations – touches of hands and kisses. Language means of indicating gestures and facial expressions accompany almost every line of the characters of the work of art.