In his new apartment building, Georges befriends with 12-year-old Safer. He tells Georges that a man in the apartment below Georges, whom he calls Mr.
X, may be smuggling dead bodies in and out of the complex. Safer draws Georges into his elaborate surveillance plan and the boys monitor Mr. X’s place regularly.
Safer even urges Georges to help him break into Mr. X’s apartment but he refuses. However, he finally learns that Safer has been lying to him. Safer never
suspects Mr. X of anything. In fact, Mr. X is a normal guy, and Safer is his dog walker. The surveillance, the break-in and the elaborate story are all just a game.
Georges is angry at Safer and feels foolish. In the same time, Georges also finally admits to himself and to the readers
that his mom has not just been working a lot of night shifts. She has got a serious infection and is in the hospital as a patient. He finally agrees to face his fears and
the reality of her illness and visits her. To overcome his fears of bullying, Georges also devises a plan, with the
help of some of the other less-than-popular kids, to trick and silence Dallas. His idea brings the nerdy kids together and helps them develop a sense of community.
Then, Georges speaks to Safer again and tries to understand the reason for the boy’s deception. He never feels secure enough that he does not like leaving
the apartment building because of the fear of the outside world. Finally, Georges helps Safer and also his classmates to overcome their fears and anxieties as well.
5. Previous Studies
There are many great researches related to the language style in literary works which analyze the function of linguistic deviation, how style is reflected by
the themes in the novel, and so on. The researches become references for the study conducted by the researcher. Even though the researches are related to style,
it does not mean they are the same. Each research has its own focus, methodology, topic, and object.
One of the studies is Stylistic Analysis of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering
Heights
that is conducted by Varghese 2012. It aims to discover what is striking about Emily Brontë’s narrative style based on the themes, styles or techniques in
Wuthering Heights
novel. The findings show that
Wuthering Heights
presents a plurality of styles, the language in the novel is full of contradictions and the
specific tensions and paradoxes built into linguistic patterns are noticeable in the word and sentence structure.
Brontë’s striking use of verbs is remarkable as it is full of violent movement and conflict in the
characters’ utterances. The characters and their environments are presented through the appropriate diction.
Furthermore, Varghese concludes that
Wuthering Heights
is stylistically written with the breaks from past to present tense, interjected remarks, broken phrases,
and half-expressed ideas which reveal the psychological state of the characters. Meanwhile, Alirezazadeh and Talebinezhad 2014 conduct a research
entitled
Synta ctic Deviations in the Novel The Sound and the Fury
. They describe what types of syntactic deviations are employed by William Faulkner in his novel,
The Sound and the Fury
, and determine in what extent the syntactic deviations help to create a novel classified as modernist literature in the field of stream of
consciousness. The first finding is that both types of syntactic deviation are found in
The Sound and the Fury
and the highest frequency belongs to bad or incorrect
grammar, but the frequency of syntactic rearrangement or hyperbaton is not statistically significant. Second, ungrammatical structures and syntactic deviations
successfully depict collapse of a family in
The Sound and the Fury
by narrating the story by an idiot as an obsessive mind. They conclude that syntactic deviations
and disjointed syntax in the novel have played a significant role in creating the atmosphere.
There have been many researches about linguistic deviation in novels. However, this research tries to reveal how the employment of transference of
meaning illuminates the themes of
Liar and Spy
novel by analyzing types and realizations of transference of meaning. The employment of the deviation is also
special since the novel as the object is children’s literature. The targeted readers of the novel are children, thus it is different from other contemporary adult novels
like the objects of the two previous studies mentioned before. However, that difference does not limit the creative use of language of the author as every word
choice in the novel has infinite meaning and specific purposes. In order to unravel what beyond the employment of transference of meaning in
Liar and Spy
novel, thus this research is conducted.
B. Conceptual Framework
This research attempts to analyze one of the works of a best-seller children’s literature writer, Rebecca Stead entitled
Liar and Spy
by using stylistic approach. Stylistics is defined as the study of style; it is the analysis of distinctive
expressions in language and the delineation of their purposes and effects. This becomes the appropriate approach to use since this research focuses on how
