Application of Roland Barthes' Narrative Codes to Leigh Bardugo's Shadow and Bone

This paper aims to find out the utilization of Roland Barthes' narrative codes in Leigh Bardugo's Shadow and Bone. The story of the novel is woven around these codes. Roland Barthes introduced these codes in 1970s, after a thorough study of the novel Sarrasine, written by Honore de Balzac. After the study, Roland Barthes made his own framework and named it, the Narrative Codes of textual analysis. These are: The Hermeneutic Code, The Proairetic Code, The Semantic Code, The Symbolic Code, and The Cultural Code. Roland Barthes' codes are part of Structuralism's approach. The story of the novel in the given study revolves around a girl named Alina Starkov. She saves the woebegone people of Ravka- a fictional city- from the influence of the Darkling. The researcher utilizes a Qualitative approach by exploiting the codes mentioned above to explore the text. The analysis discusses the findings with reference to the novel. Many quotations have been taken from the text of the novel to make the study and analysis genuine. The study is limited to a few extracts of the novel and it concludes that Proairetic and Enigmatic code is used more frequently than others. Language is used as a tool to manifest cultural code. While the semantic code is least used in the novel