An M.A. thesis at University of Basrah entitled: The Significance of Deixis in the Theatre of the Absurd with Special Reference to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party: A Pragmatic Study.

An M.A. thesis at University of Basrah entitled: The Significance of Deixis in the Theatre of the Absurd with Special Reference to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party: A Pragmatic Study.

The thesis has been discussed at the department of English, College of Education for Human Sciences, University of Basrah.

Abstract: There are some very common words in our language that cannot be understood at all if we do not know their situational context. Some sentences of English are virtually impossible to understand if we do not know who is speaking, about whom, where and when. Deixis is always found in our daily communication or in texts. It is a technical term (from Greek, meaning ‘pointing’) for one of the most basic things we do with utterances. Any linguistic form such as (you, me, here, today, yesterday, etc.) used to accomplish this ‘pointing’ is called a deictic expression. Deixis is clearly a form of referring that is tied to the speaker’s context.

Thesis Outline: The study falls into six chapters. Chapter One introduces the preliminaries of the study. Chapters Two and Three present a theoretical background on the concept of deixis and the Theatre of the Absurd, respectively. Chapter Fours displays the analysis of deictic expressions found in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Pinter’s The Birthday Party. Chapter Five shows the discussion of the results of deixis detected in the two mentioned plays. Finally, Chapter Six provides the concluding remarks of the study.

Conclusions: The study has arrived at the following conclusions. First, deixis can be viewed as a literary paradigm in the analysis of literary works, and that Levinson’s model can be applied to analyse such works. Second, the majority of the utterances of two plays have been noticed to contain deictic elements. Third, the style, language and order of events of the Theatre of the Absurd is different from that of traditional drama. Fourth, the role that deixis plays is vital in that it gives order to the articulation of speech act. It generates a kind of integrated meaning that is produced from various linguistic modes. Fifth, in the Theatre of the Absurd, deictic expressions are utilised to create a world that is featured as being illogical. Indeed, it is to portray the notion of human loss of life that people experienced following WWI and WWII.