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

Year 2021, Volume: 3 Issue: 2, 386 - 394, 29.12.2021

Mustafa Canlı

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

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