"Nothing, she thought, had ever been so interesting.” Psychonarration and the embodied cognition of uncertainty in Coraline, a children’s gothic novella by Neil Gaiman

Abstract

My close reading analysis of Neil Gaiman’s horror fantasy novella Coraline relies on the methodological apparatuses of corporeal narratology and cognitive poetics with the aim to scrutinise the child protagonist’s internal monologue as a self-reflective manifestation of the embodied cognition of uncertainty that surfaces during the psychic and physical confrontation with the Freudian uncanny experience. Coraline’s „psychonarration” (Cohn, Nikolajeva) attempts to convey the cognitive dissonance caused by troubling and troubled sensorial impressions. It is an odd attempt to silently verbalise subconscious, unspoken emotions and perceptions which rarely gain vocalisation as they take shape only fleetingly within the focaliser’s mental landscape. Through a special narratological, rhetorical feat of the children’s gothic genre the uncanny eventually turns funcanny, and invites readers to associate the embodied cognition of uncertainty with pleasurable thrills and dark humour.