A Cognitive Analysis of Persona in Atwood’s You Fit into Me: The Reader’s Shift from Love to Disgust

Abstract

Poetry evokes a myriad of feelings as readers embark on their journey within a text. This is evident in the immersion of readers when they engage with the text. This is aided by deixis, which constructs parameters of person, time, and space within a speech act and relates it to the context in which it is uttered. In Deictic Shift Theory (DST) terms, invested readers project or shift themselves into a fictional world. Thus, readers experience the plot as if they are companions to fictitious characters. Cognitively, readers shift into the story world and within it, they make sense of the narrative. They also experience containment (In Image schema’s terms). This makes DST useful to examine the viewpoint(s) used to tell a narrative. You Fit into Me is a quatrain that requires heavy work from readers in terms of deictic shifts. Margaret Atwood subjects her readers to shock waves; in four lines she depicts four stages in a relationship between a female narrator and her male addressee, starting with lovemaking and ending with impalement. This study aims to explore the persona’s feelings and by extension the readers’, as they shift their deictic center to be cognitively immersed in the persona’s hostile origo. As per DST, this study argues that readers’ shift and therefore immersion and involvement in this short poem are increased due to the dense emotional content of the poem.