Language or the Verbal Maintenance of the World in "Night Mail" by Hoda Barakat

Abstract

The research perspective here stems from the awareness with which the novel was written, a linguistic awareness that prominently and conspicuously established a pattern of profound belief in the absolute power of words. Letter writing represented the essence of this awareness, and the worlds of its senders appeared as a linguistic problem stemming from a long memory of misunderstandings that occurred between the parties, disrupting communication between them. Because speech is the act that simultaneously creates and recreates the reality of things, the heroes of these letters chose it to restore the personal history of their pain from the imposed distance of its vital power to retrieve their own beings. Speech thus became their final act, clearly revealing the contradictions of the world.