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Identity and Speech Maxims: A Linguistic Analysis of Communication in Pinter’s The Caretaker
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
Authors
Dr. Ghulam Murtaza
Associate Professor, Department of English, Government College University Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan
Qasim Shafiq
Ph. D Scholar, Department of English, National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad, Pakistan
Dr. Ali Usman Saleem
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Government College University Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan
Keywords
Flouting of Speech Maxims, Pinterese, Pragmatics, Theatre of the Absurd
