INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND TRANSLATION STUDIES (IJELR), cilt.10, sa.1, 2023 (Hakemli Dergi)
The majority of works of literature
depict the world of what many people call normal characters, in this case the
characters without disabilities, especially the deaf. Mark Medoff’s play,
Children of Lesser God, depicts a world of a deaf character who has been
neglected by his surrounding many for the reason that she (Sarah) cannot
understand the world of normal people. However, this study analyzes the
structure of discourses made by Sarah to show the fact that unlike the majority
of characters in the play, the silent world of Sara is full of diverse deep
psychological insight, none of which are identifiable for the other characters.
In this article, it will be shown that what deaf people can understand from
their surroundings is more than the grasp of common people’s words and actions.
They, in fact, are capable of understanding what goes under the very seemingly
unimportant words or deeds of common people. Consequently, this article leads
to the realization that the silence of this minor group of disabled people is
full of polyphonies and, therefore, this article uses some of Bakhtin’s
polyphonic discourse types to shed light on the abundance of such facts. The
final stage of this study depicts the world of deaf people as a world belonging
neither to common humans, nor what common humans think of these deaf
individuals; they, in fact, experience a third-world in which any signification
is necessarily deep in terms of its thematic structure.
necessarily deep in terms of its thematic s