Representation of the hero in oral narratives by homeless adolescents

Abstract

This article analyses the figure of the hero in oral narratives by homeless adolescents. These narratives, based on fairy tales read by a researcher and produced spontaneously, were tape-recorded and transcribed. The data were analyzed based on French Discourse Analysis, as well as on Psychoanalysis, focusing on two narratives produced by two adolescent siblings, a girl and a boy, who told stories based on the same fairy tale: “Hansel and Gretel”. The construction of the hero across both narratives allowed us to elaborate interpretations about the dynamics of these adolescents’ lives, their family structure, and the prejudices they experienced. We concluded that such narratives enabled the teenagers to talk about themselves in an unconscious and concealed way, especially with respect to psychologically or ideologically interdicted contents, and that the figure of the hero is constructed on the basis of an identification process, in which the subjects see themselves as the authors of their own story.