Guiding Questions:

• What do you learn about the narrator and the young girl?
• What is the importance of the carnival?

This extract from the novel ‘Chocolat’ by Joanne Harris follows a mother and her daughter’s first time in the french town of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes. It is a modern text, and as they arrive, a carnival is in full swing. 

Harris clearly establishes, and emphasises the importance of, the relationship between mother and daughter within the first paragraph when she has the narrator describe her child’s eyes as ‘the blue-green of the Earth’. This metaphor could suggest that she sees the world in her daughter’s eyes, perhaps indicating that the narrator’s driving purpose is to give her child a good life, the main responsibility of a parent. The compound adjective ‘blue-green’ connotes life, nature and purity, as green is often the colour associated with life, and blue is the colour of the water that nurtures it, possibly reflecting the maternal, nurturing relationship of the pair. Furthermore, Harris might be implying that they cannot flourish, or even live, without each other, as life cannot thrive without water, and water is meaningless without life to support.

As well as this, we also learn that the narrator and her daughter feel like outsiders in the town. When describing the people around them, the narrator, in a sense, steps out of her own body to describe herself and her daughter, saying that ‘Their colouring marks them.’ The fact that the text briefly switches from third to first person narration could indicate that the narrator feels so uncomfortable being watched by the townsfolk of Lansquenet that she feels like an outsider even in her own body, and the short sentence employed by Harris further emphasises this point. The verb ‘marks’ implies that the narrator and her daughter are targets, an idea that connotes fear and the threat of violence.

Additionally, Harris builds on this feeling of being viewed as an outsider by having the extract take place at a carnival. This choice of setting could be extremely significant because a carnival is a place where people view strange and exciting oddities for entertainment, and could perhaps mirror the way that the townsfolk view the narrator and her daughter. In the same way that they watch the floats, they watch the foreigners, for amusement. However, Harris also chooses to have Anouk and her mother partake in enjoying the carnival, which could be a commentary on the idea that all people, even those who know what it is like to be on the other side of it, are guilty of viewing foreigners as a spectacle to be observed.