Buffoonery in the Speech of the Character and the Issue of Historical Form in the Novel The Winter of Our Discontent by J. Steinbeck

• Main Authors: Kapitalina V. Sinegubova, Anastasia A. Aksenova
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University) 2021-12-01
• Series: RUDN Journal of Studies in Literature and Journalism
• Subjects: the word in the novel; pathetic; character’s mask; hybridization
• Online Access: http://journals.rudn.ru/literary-criticism/article/viewFile/26077/19229

The intention is to explain some aspects of hybridization of language consciousness in this literary work. The aim of the study is to clarify the issue of a word in the novel, which was updated by M.M. Bakhtin. The general thesis is that the tendency to hybridization explains the juxtaposition of serious and funny within the characters utterance: the border between prosaic reality and the characters own world is found precisely when he turns to jokes. The speech of the character indicates a tendency to aestheticize the household environment. This trend leads to a high-intensity hybridization of everyday words and Holy Scripture . The novel The Winter of Our Discontent is more than a didactic literary work and reveals some features of the picaresque novel, but the necessary feature of the picaresque novel is the first-person narrative. Instead of this form of narration the character and the narrators points of view are brought closer together in the novel by J. Steinbeck. The literary work with the features of the picaresque novel remains multidimensional and does not reduce only to one of the existing novel forms, and typologically is rather anti-picaresque. The characters buffoonery gives him the right to detachment, due to which the skewed nature of other characters in the novel is overcome. The language hybridization in this work plays a key role in understanding of the novel.