Thematic Oppositions in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

Abstract: This essay examines anticipation and real outcome structured as two oppositions in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. These opposites will be analyzed through Austen’s use of literary devices such as “free indirect speech” and irony. Pride and Prejudice is written in third-person, but the focus is often limited to Elizabeth’s perspective, creating what is termed free indirect speech, a narrative technique that Austen is considered to be one of the first novelists to use. While the omniscient narrator seems all-knowing and gives the illusion of being objective, she is deliberately selective in her choice of what aspects of the story that she wants to emphasize, which makes her subjective. That the narrator is both objective/omniscient and subjective/limited brings out an opposition between the anticipated and real outcome. Austen also uses irony as a literary device, which too can be interpreted as a kind of opposition used to bring out anticipated and real outcome.