Abstract
The declarative element of Beckett’s narratives derives from his increasingly telegraphic and minimalist style, a style found in narratives that are stripped of traditional, ‘sense-making’1 forms — such as sequential progression of plot, character development, and ordered fictional worlds with space-time2 coordinates. When the text’s language itself is then denied syntactical and grammatical consonance, the text defies the reader’s impulse to organise these unpunctuated, subverted and asyntactical sentences, leaving him/her confronted with a rhetoric of abstraction (through enantiomorphism, hyperbaton, anastrophe, ellipsis, anacoluthon, annomination, parataxis and incremental repetition).
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© 1990 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Trieloff, B. (1990). ‘Babel of Silence’: Beckett’s Post-Trilogy Prose Articulated. In: Butler, L.S.J., Davis, R.J. (eds) Rethinking Beckett. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20561-5_5
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