Loss of language has taken from Rye what gave her life meaning, and without language, she is on the brink of ending her own life. But the pandemic took everything she most valued: she lost her ability to read and write, her whole family died, and-in a final twist of the knife-the illness “cut even the living off from one another” by ending their ability to communicate, thereby making survivors unable to collectively grieve. Before the illness, Rye was a historian, writer, and lover of books who was married with children. Towards the end of the story, Butler reveals the purpose of Rye’s trip to Pasadena: she’s leaving her home to keep herself from suicide. In addition to provoking violence between strangers, loss of language triggers widespread despair that can make people violent towards themselves and the people they love. Clearly, this is something she’s experienced before without language, even the most normal, straightforward activities-like riding the bus-have become fraught with danger. Rye’s reaction suggests that this is a regular occurrence: as soon as the driver hits the brakes, she exits the bus, wanting to duck behind a tree trunk in case the men start shooting. This miscommunication leads to a larger brawl between other passengers on the bus, which disrupts their journey. Without a way to communicate, neither man can de-escalate the fight or clear up what actually happened. Rye is more or less right: the bus hits a pothole and one man is thrown into the other, who interprets this as aggression rather than seeing it as an accident. Showing how common this is, Rye correctly predicts how this altercation will go: that they’ll fight as soon as something happens that breaks their “limited ability to communicate,” such as one of their “mock punches” accidentally making contact. As Rye takes the bus towards Pasadena, she watches two men “grunting and gesturing at each other,” on the brink of physical violence-they’re engaged in “a disagreement of some kind, or, more likely, a misunderstanding.” As this description makes clear, these men aren’t about to fight because they actually disagree or because their interests are at odds-instead, they’re going to fight simply because they’re failing to communicate. By narrating a day in the life of Rye, a resident of dystopian Los Angeles who is trying to travel to Pasadena, Octavia Butler shows how the loss of language leads inevitably to chaos and violence.īutler opens the story by directly linking miscommunication with violence. Because of this, society has broken down: the government and police no longer exist, armed bandits roam the streets sowing chaos, and when communicating by gesture fails-as it often does-violence erupts between civilians. In the world of “Speech Sounds,” a mysterious illness has spread around the globe and left most of its survivors unable to speak, read, write, or understand spoken language.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |