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The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud published between 2003 and 2006. This was the series of books that I have chosen to examine.

The series follows the life’s of three characters, the title character Bartimaeus a mid level spirit, Nathaniel and Kitty. The story is written and told from these three characters perspectives throughout the novel.

The basic plot summary is, Nathaniel 12 (at the start of the book one) summons a djinn (spirit) who must do what he commands. They become friends and their relationship changes throughout the books as the face challenges together. The novels in a sense simular to the Harry Potter series in that magic is only available to a few people, but different in that the commoners or “muggles” know that magician are more powerful and so have power in government.

This leads to one of the major discourses that are in the text, the discourse of Class. Throughout the books, there are essentially two classes “commoners” and “magicians”. A signifier of this is a comment made by magician “those commoners know they should be inside by now” Even within the spirits there are “five basic levels of spirits, imps-foliots” etc. The high-ranking people in government in this book are considered highly superior “Nathaniel realised that the Prime Minister was making a blatant show of his power to all his assembled ministers”

Class is a very important discourse as it creates a feeling of superiority towards the main characters as they are of higher ranks. A signifier of this is “they should be kneeling down before us, as we are far more than they could ever be”. All characters are a higher status apart from Kitty who is a commoner and is initially viewed in the series as worthless and not worth the time of day.

This is a discourse that people can relate to, as most people like to be of a higher class than others and people often dislike those who are of lower class....