Violation of Grice’s Maxims and its Effect on the Conversational Structure and Plot Development of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Abstract

The goal of this article is to analyze Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (2005) from the perspective of a combined linguistic analysis made up of stylistics, narration and pragmatics. Herbert Paul Grice’s cooperative principle is used in order to illustrate the crucial features of the narrative style of the novel and account for its conversational structure and plot development. After a literature review, the basic notions of Jenny Thomas’s “meaning in interaction” concept and Grice’s cooperative principle are applied on the selected extracts from the novel. Several reviewers’ analyses are given for a comprehension of the effects of the violation of Grice’s maxims. The narrative style of the novel, violation of Grice’s maxims and its effect on the novel’s dramatic structure are shown how the novel is introduced, constructed with complications, and then revealed. The lack of maxims manipulates readers’ expectations through presentation, especially by spinning a net of loss of interaction and withholding certain information. Using Grice’s principle on the conversations that make up the complications in the story, the study illustrates that the foreshadowing strategy of Ishiguro is made possible through the violation of Grice’s conversational maxims. As a conclusion, eliminating context from the conversations in the plot structure is found to be an indispensable and complementary tool for Ishiguro’s narrative elegance.

Keywords

• Cooperative principle
• Grice
• Narration
• Ishiguro
• Novel

References

1. Barrow, A. (2005, February 25). Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro: Artist of a floating world. The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/never-let-me-go-by-kazuo-ishiguro-746328.html
2. Corder, S. P. (1981). Error analysis and interlanguage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3. Deb, S. (2005, March 7). Lost corner. Newstatesman. https://www.newstatesman.com/node/161666
4. Dyer, G. (2005, February 27). Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/never-let-me-go-by-kazuo-ishiguro-746712.html
5. Grice, P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.). Syntax and semantics (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic Press.
6. Hensher, P. (2005, February 26). School for scandal. The Spectator. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/school-for-scandal
7. Ishiguro, K. (2005). Never Let Me Go. London: Faber and Faber.
8. Kakutani, M. (2005, April 4). Sealed in a world that’s not as it seems. The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9503EEDD1E3FF937A35757C0A9639C8B63

9. Kemp, P. (2005, February 20). Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. The Sunday Times. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/never-let-me-go-by-kazuo-ishiguro-0v9mbp99jmh
10. Menand, L. (2005, March 20). Something about Kathy: Ishiguro’s quasi-science-fiction novel. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/03/28/something-about-kathy
11. O’Neil, J. (2005, May). Finds and flops. The Atlantic Magazine. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/05/new-fiction/303918/
12. Ryan, M. L. (1991). Possible worlds, artificial intelligence and narrative theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
13. Semino, E. (2005). Possible worlds: stylistics applications. In K. Brown (Eds.), Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (pp. 777-782). Elsevier. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B0-08-044854-2/00534-4
14. The Economist. (2005, March 19). Organ failure. The Economist. https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2005/03/17/organ-failure
15. Thomas, J. (1995). Meaning in interaction: An introduction to pragmatics. London: Longman. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315842011
16. Wilensky, R. (1983). Story grammars versus story points. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 6(4), 579-591. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00017520
17. Yardley, J. (2005, April 17). Never Let Me Go. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54996-2005Apr14.html