THE POETICS OF JOHN BOYNE’S NOVEL «THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS». AN INTERMEDIAL ASPECT OF PLOT INTERPRETATION

Abstract

This article examines the poetics and educational potential of John Boyne’s novel «The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas», as well as its film adaptation. The study leads to the following conclusions: a) from philosophical and intertextual per-spectives, the young protagonists of Boyne’s novel can symbolize the deceived German people (represented by Bruno’s naive consciousness) and the Jewish people resigned to their fate (represented by Shmuel, who bears no malice toward his friend); b) the harsh reality of the novel’s fictional world is conveyed through the use of an unreliable narrator—specifically, by framing events through the eyes of a naive child (Bruno) who has not yet encountered evil and cannot even conceive of its scale; the work’s composition, rooted in contrasts, is further enhanced by a non-linear narrative structure; c) the Russian translation of the novel falls short in rendering certain moments the author considers signifi-cant—specifically, the child’s mispronunciation of words like "Auschwitz," "Führer," and others; d) in terms of emo-tional impact on the audience, the film adaptation’s ending is more powerful than the book’s final lines, a factor that partly accounts for the success of the movie; e) from a didactic standpoint, the objective presentation of Nazism and the Holocaust to children through Boyne’s novel—a work chronologically far removed from the brutal realities of World War II—remains a contentious issue; the young Irish author’s portrayal of the proponents of Hitler’s ideology appears overly sanitized.