HEARING THE UNHEARABLE: A DIALOGUE OF SILENCE IN CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD BY MARK MEDOFF


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Daneshara S.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND TRANSLATION STUDIES (IJELR), cilt.10, sa.1, 2023 (Hakemli Dergi)

Özet

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