Terry Pratchett's Narrative Worlds by Marion Rana

Author:Marion Rana
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

In The Bromeliad, it is noteworthy that the nomes cannot go back to their old home. This stresses the fact that they have grown and irrevocably changed at the end of the story, and confirms the relevance of the novels to the category of the Bildungsroman.

The move from a small home to a different, much larger one as a portrayal of the maturation process is enhanced by the play on scale and the effect of the mise en abyme of the nomes’ world, with the gradual transcending of boundaries from the microcosm of the hideout in the ground to the infinity of space. This might be a reference to Mole coming out of his hole and discovering both the River Bank and utterly new perspectives in The Wind in the Willows, the book which helped Pratchett become a reader as a child, especially as size is one of the sources of humour in Kenneth Grahame’s book when Toad becomes involved with humans and is seen alongside them.27 The nomes’ passage from underground hiding places to outer space, from primitiveness to civilisation, and from ignorance to knowledge is repeatedly staged, through their travels and trials, as the discovery that one’s small world is embedded in a bigger one, which is itself set in a larger one, etc. The discovery of an ever-larger world is represented in the books by the theme of limits that always seem to move further away. At the beginning, the world of Masklin’s small tribe is bound by the motorway, while the world of the Store nomes is bound by the walls of the building and the different departments of the Store (which divide the nomes into different, clear-cut castes). The world of the ‘geese nomes’ they meet in Florida in Wings is bound by the limits of the natural reserve and the sky. Such receding limits picture the nomes’ increasing knowledge and their coming of age as a species. Thanks to dramatic irony, a discrepancy is created between the way the nomes see the world and, in Andy Sawyer’s words, ‘the larger pattern [seen by the reader but that] the characters miss in favour of misunderstandings and perfectly constructed illogic’.28 This gap is both the incentive for improvement for the nomes and the mainspring of humour for young readers.

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