Deixis is one of the central elements in language through which both the physical and ideological stance of the participants in a linguistic communication are demonstrated. In narrative fiction, these participants primarily include the narrator and the characters of the story, whose relations in that fictional universe of discourse the reader understands, among other things, via analyzing the deictic items they use. This study aims at investigating the cognitive function of different kinds of deixis such as spatial, temporal, textual, perceptual, relational, and compositional deixis in Iris Murdock’s The Bell (1958), which because of its special narrative discourse proves to be a representative example of how deixis influences cognition. The present research deals with the text worlds and mind styles shaped in this novel by using various kinds of deixis, among other textual elements, and explains the relationship between these text worlds and the way they influence the process of reading comprehension in the case of this novel. For doing so, this qualitative study uses Peter Stockwell’s reformulation of the cognitive deixis theory to examine Dora Greenfield’s character in this novel, who is one of the major character-focalizers. Finally, this study carries implications for reading comprehension in English language teaching as prose fictional narratives, whether authentic or graded, are frequently employed for practicing reading comprehension in different reading comprehension courses. In conclusion, based on the analysis, firstly, all the types of deictic words are used in the selected extracts from the novel. Secondly, it is shown that deictic words have a cognitive function in the process of reading and that they have various implications for teaching reading comprehension that should be regarded.
