Absurdism In The Amazing World Of Gumball’s The Faith Episode: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This research is conducted to expose the existence of Absurdism from Camus in The Amazing World of Gumball’s The Faith episode. The research focuses on the linguistic and visual elements of the cartoon. Therefore, this research uses Systematic Functional Linguistic (SFL) from Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) and Multimodal from Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) as the theories. Fairclough’s (1995) Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used as the framework in this research. Moreover, it is also used to organize the other theories used in this research. Absurdism from Camus is used to prove the existence of Absurdism in the episode. The research is conducted under qualitative methodology and case study. The data is collected by using Generic structure from Halliday and Hasan (1989). The data is separated into two, linguistic elements and visual elements. The linguistic elements are analyzed by SFL focusing on ideational and interpersonal metafunction. The visual elements are examined by all metafunctions from multimodal. Subsequently, the result of the data analysis is interpreted using Absurdism from Camus. Afterward, the socio-cultural context is combined with the result of the interpretation. The result of these three steps analysis shows that linguistic and visual elements from this cartoon hold Absurdism in the episode. Some steps of Absurdism from Camus are also elaborated together in this episode as the theme of the story. The socio-cultural context also proves its contribution to the production process of the episode, especially in the preference of issues used in The Faith episode.