Abstract
The Caretaker by Harold Pinter is a representative play of the
Theatre of the Absurd rich in communication gap and
breakdown of language resulting from the failure of human
relationships in the wake of post-World War II conditions.
Pinteresque language is marked with the incessant flouting of
communication principles, tautological repetition based on real
speech pauses, silences. Non-observance of Gricean maxims is
employed by Pinter’s characters to conceal their real identity
because the loser in a contest of words and their meaning loses
his claim to live. In this sense, Pinter’s language is a weapon to
fight the battle of social space and image through concealment
of intention and/or half-communication or conscious
miscommunication of intention. Therefore, everyone is
deceiving everyone else. Aston, incapable of facing and hence
communicating to others because of hospitalized violence on
him, is monosyllabic throughout the play except in his soliloquy
wherein he speaks to himself. Davies’s language is incoherent
like his dress but superfluous and shows excessively repetitive
violation of the maxims especially of quantity in view of Aston’s
weak persona. Speech maxims are flouted for Identity because
of mental vacillation, to conceal linguistic incapacity, for
supremacy and power, and for evasion
Dr. Ghulam Murtaza , Qasim Shafiq, Dr. Ali Usman Saleem. (2020) Identity and Speech Maxims: A Linguistic Analysis of Communication in Pinter’s The Caretaker, Pakistan Social Sciences Review, Volume 4, Issue 3.
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