"Each One of THese Ghosts has a Story": The Function of Storytelling in P. Pillmann's "The Amaber Spyglass" and D. Almonds 'Kit's Wilderness"
"Each One of THese Ghosts has a Story": The Function of Storytelling in P. Pillmann's "The Amaber Spyglass" and D. Almonds 'Kit's Wilderness"

Summary/Abstract: In Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass, the last novel in His Dark Materials trilogy, the heroine, Lyra Belaqua, meets her Death, leaves her soul behind and enters the Land of the Dead. Once there, she frees the dead from their eternal prison of nothingness and enables them to rejoin the land of the living and be 'out in the open, part of everything alive again'. This astonishing feat, in many aspects comparable to Christ's celebrated victory over Death, is achieved through - storytelling. David Almond's novel Kit's Wilderness, on the other hand, is much less ambitious in scope, but equally poignant and compelling in its portrayal of the life-saving, life-affirming power of storytelling and art in general. The paper analyzes the different ways in which these two authors emphasize the power of creativity to give meaning to human life – the task especially relevant in this day and age, when the value of life is denied on a daily basis. Also, The Amber Spyglass and Kit's Wilderness are examined in the larger context of the genre/mode they belong to: young adult fantasy and magic realism respectively. In contrast to common dismissal of fantasy as self-indulging escapism, it will be argued that these particular novels do not utilize the conventions of fantasy in order to encourage their young readers to escape from the 'real' world, but to communicate some very real, universally human, existential experiences. The didactic-socializing aspect of young adult literature will be taken into account as well, in an attempt to demonstrate that both novels, while employing the conventions of fantasy, actually convey explicit messages of crucial importance for the life here and now, firmly grounded in the belief that, as Pullman puts it, 'for us there isn't any elsewhere'.

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