Analysis of Deviation in Adichie’s Novel Notes on Grief

Abstract

The best way to deal with pain caused by the demise of a loved one is through writing. However, in that state of grief there is the likelihood of the writer's state of mind affecting his or her logic and chronology of the language. This is because pain can alter ways of communicating and passing information. This study is a stylistic analysis of how Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has used language deviation in her novel Notes on Grief to express her intense feelings regarding the loss of her father and her own life story of interacting with her dad. The study was led by the subsequent objectives; to investigate how the author deviates semantically and graphologically to express her message in the novel, to find out how the writer achieves lexical and syntactic deviation in the process of writing in the novel, and to determine if morphological deviation helps the author to express her message in the novel. The primary data collection was done through a close reading the novel to produce a corpus of the deviations. The theory of foregrounding was used to test whether the data collected fulfilled the objectives of the study. Adichie has used different aspects of semantic deviation with Metaphors, paradoxes, and hyperbole being the widely used forms of semantic deviations used. The graphological deviations Adichie uses to express her grief are indentation, leaving empty pages, starting a chapter half the page, bolding, and using italics on some sentences to defamiliarize the novel and evoke a feeling of grief. She has used several aspects of lexical deviations such as affixation, compounding, repetition, and conversion to create new words and rhyme. The writer has broken the rules of sentence formation to express the meaning of the text to the reader. Some of the syntactic deviations in the novel Notes on Grief are: the use of incorrect or bad grammar in the construction of sentences, syntactic rearrangement or hyperbaton, use of parenthesis, and the use of parallel sentence structure. The writer has also broken the rules of morphology to construct words that pass the message to the reader. The writer has utilized her creativity to add morphemes to produce new words that enhance the message to the reader of the text