BİR ÖNCELEME İNCELEMESİ: SAMUEL BECKETT'IN "PING" ADLI KISA HİKÂYESİ

Abstract

This study investigates the foregrounded patterns inosculated to form Nobel Prize-winning author, critic, and playwright Samuel Beckett’s short story “Ping” and aims to reveal his purpose of using these patterns. One of the remarkable contributions of Russian Formalism and Prag School Structuralism to stylistics is the concept of foregrounding by which writers bring a particular textual pattern (a phoneme, word, phrase, clause, etc.) to the fore by making it salient or deviant from what surrounds it to draw readers' attention to it and to make it both memorable and interpretable. Beckett, like many authors, takes two basic ways to foreground certain elements: foregrounding-through-deviation and foregrounding-through-parallelism/repetition. Besides its confinement to a single paragraph, from the beginning, the story stands out with the omission of punctuation marks, except for the full stop, sentences with no verb or with only non-finite verbs (the present and past participles), and the conversion of some adjectives into verbs. These deviant patterns enable Beckett to present a free-flowing form of (limited or impaired) consciousness and emphasize that the character is in his/her very last moment and s/he cannot move. By doing so, he invites readers to immerse themselves unreservedly in what the character feels or perceives. To reflect an instance of awareness or perception in an extreme situation where the character is on the brink of existence or non-existence and is struggling to find some meaning, Beckett also adopts other foregrounded patterns such as the repetition of a limited number of words and phrases with some alterations, employment of certain nouns in different positions in the sentences, and sentences that begin with particular words or phrases but end differently. Apart from those, Beckett offers another example of foregrounding at the end of the English version. Thus, he makes the readers aware of the fictionality of the story.d patterns such as the repetition of a limited number of words and phrases with some alterations, employment of certain nouns in different positions in the sentences, and sentences that begin with particular words or phrases but end differently. Apart from those, Beckett offers another example of foregrounding at the end of the English version. Thus, he makes the readers aware of the fictionality of the story.