Breach of Contract: Pragmatic Variations on a Theme in Richard Ford’s Short Story “Privacy”

• Published in: Etudes de stylistique anglaise no. 4; pp. 119 - 131
• Main Author: Gay, Marie-Agnès
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Société de stylistique anglaise 01.03.2013
• Subjects: analyse du discours; stylistique; stylistics; A Multitude of Sins; discourse analysis; pragmatique; Labov (William); narrator / narratee relationship; relation narrateur / narrataire; pragmatics; Ford (Richard)
• ISSN: 2116-1747; 2650-2623
• DOI: 10.4000/esa.1487

While resorting to various pragmatic tools, the paper draws especially on William Labov’s theory of the six stages of oral story-telling in order to analyze the deceptive mainsprings of narration in Richard Ford’s “Privacy”. This five-page short story told by a homodiegetic narrator offers obvious parallels, because of its short length and its narrative mode, to an oral tale. The paper scrutinizes the way the text pretends to abide very strictly by the classical structure of story-telling in order the better to subvert it, the text thus reproducing in its very form – and more particularly at the level of the narrator/narratee relationship – its central thematic motif of deception. Beyond this, the paper demonstrates that the play with the narratee and the violation of communicative rules paradoxically mask a more radically solipsistic attempt at self-deception on the narrator’s part.