The Rhetorical Grammar of Radicalization in Extremist Self-Narration: A Discursive-Narrative Study of Mein Kampf and My Twisted World

This study develops an integrated analytic framework that combines Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and narrative theory to examine how extremist texts transform personal grievance into legitimized violence. Although the study does not advance a general theory of radicalization, it identifies the rhetorical grammar through which suffering is recast as moral entitlement to violence. Through a comparative analysis of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Elliot Rodger’s My Twisted World, the study traces a common discursive-narrative trajectory: perceived victimhood, enemy construction, moralized violence, and mythologized selfhood. Rather than applying CDA and narrative theory in parallel, the analysis demonstrates how discursive strategies, such as dehumanization, affective intensification, and moral binaries, actively shape narrative arcs of redemption and retribution. The findings reveal how language does not merely describe violence but structures it into narrative inevitability. By foregrounding form over ideology, this integrated approach offers a transferable analytic model that clarifies how such rhetorical grammars operate across historical and contemporary extremist contexts, including digitally mediated environments. In doing so, it contributes to a deeper understanding of how ideological violence is produced through the interplay of rhetorical form and narrative logic.