Narrative mechanisms and speech acts in Naoki Higashida’s the Reason I Jump

Vollständiger Abstract

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The study investigates the role of questions in The Reason I Jump as a means of creating meaning rather than simply operating as requests for information. While existing research mainly focused on the thematic representations of autism, this study examines how questions as communicative acts coincide with narrative structures. Based on speech act theory and narratology, the study proposes an integrated pragma-narratological framework to analyze 58 questions from Naoki Higashida’s memoir. It synthesizes qualitative explanations with a quantitative pattern analysis to explore how illocutionary force and narratology interact. The findings reveal that several questions often function as hybrid speech acts, mainly combining directives and expressives, through which the narrator reflects his intentions and insights. Simultaneously, the narrator’s functions (testimonial, communicative, directing, and ideological) and narrative structures (voice, time, and mood) systematically shape how these questions are presented, mediating the representation of Naoki's autistic experience. The results suggest that meaning in the text arises from the interaction between communicative narrative form rather than content alone. The study employs a pragma-narratological framework to re-conceptualize autism narratives by analyzing how literary texts create and convey peripheral experiences.