In my thesis, I explore the specificities of the child narrator in literature and analyse how child narrators understand death in the novels Ballerina, Ballerina by Marko Sosič, The Boy and Death by Lojze Kovačič, and The Life Before Us by Romain Gary. In the first part, from a literary-theoretical perspective, I discuss the unreliable narrator, examining how their unreliability is manifested in the text, its origins, and how it alters the reader's role in deciphering and naturalizing the narrative. I then analyse how the portrayal of children in literature has evolved over time and why reconstructing children's voices demands special attention from authors. I focus particularly on the differences in perception between children and adults, especially in experiencing and understanding non-normative life experiences. Using developmental psychology theories, I investigate how children at different developmental stages comprehend death. In the second part of the thesis, I place the narrators of the selected three novels into a psychological context, identify the characteristics of their developmental stages through textual examples, and analyse their understanding of death. Each novel provides a slightly different insight into a child's perception of death, demonstrating that the response to traumatic events is individual for each child. I find that the understanding of death by these three narrators largely aligns with the findings of developmental psychology, yet also transcends its generalizations. I conclude the thesis with an analysis of textual cues used by the authors to articulate the narrator's understanding of death, thereby justifying the child’s perspective of their narrators.
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