EDWARD ALBEE: “UNUSUAL. INCREDIBLE UNEXPECTED"

"What Happened at the Zoo"»: people in cages of loneliness.- “I’m not afraid of Virginia Woolf”: truth and illusion. - Albee's artistic philosophy: between absurdism and realism.

The health of a nation and society is determined by the kind of art they need.

Edward Albee

Edward Albee is the most prominent figure of that generation of playwrights who appeared after T. Williams and A. Miller. Albee's bold, innovative plays are staged in the best theaters in the world and made into films. Already during his lifetime, several monographs and special bibliographies were published about him, and the total number of works devoted to him exceeds a thousand.

“What Happened at the Zoo”: People in Cages of Loneliness

Early recognition: "cult figure." The life story of Albee (Edward Albee, b. 1928) evokes associations with those popular at the end of the 19th century. Horatio Alger's novels about “American success”: their heroes, poor people, by the will of a happy accident rise to the heights of prosperity. Albee was adopted by rich people, his childhood and youth were serene, he studied at private schools, changed a number of professions, then followed a quick and very successful start in drama. Recognition came to him from overseas: a phenomenon, as you know, is not uncommon for American artists words. In 1959, at the premiere of his play What Happened at the Zoo, a huge ovation broke out at the Schiller Theater in West Berlin. The play was then staged on other European stages.

Since the early 1960s, Albee has been conquering the American stage. He comes to literature at a turning point. Broadway theater is experiencing a crisis - commercial and creative. America needs a playwright who can express “new times.” Albee becomes that. Since then, theater critics have written about him abundantly and in different ways. Opinions are sometimes expressed that are polar. He has “sexual fantasies”, “plotless naturalism”, and simply “dirt”. But perhaps those who see in him a “Protestant playwright” are right, “ social critic”, which, entering literature in the 1960s, expressed the rebellious sentiments of that decade.

Albee on the purpose of the theater. My public position Albee defines it this way: “I have never been a political writer inclined towards didactics, although, as can easily be seen in my plays, my sympathies are significantly to a greater extent belong to the left than to the right. How people live in society and how they deceive themselves is what concerns me most.”

Broadway and Hollywood personified the worst aspects of the “entertainment industry” for Albee, and the concept of absurdism acquired a very specific meaning. “What could be more absurd,” Albee wrote in the article “What Theater is Really Absurd?” (What Is the Theater of Absurd?, 1962) - than theater, which is based on aesthetic criteria: a “good” play is one that brings money, a “bad” one is one that does not; a theater in which playwrights are encouraged (isn't it very funny word) recognize yourself as a wheel of a huge machine; a theater in which the imitation of nature is replaced by the imitation of imitation... a theater in which not a single play by Beckett, Brecht, Chekhov, Ibsen, O'Casey, Pirandello, Strindberg or Shakespeare is performed in a given season!

Condemning the “lazy public”, greedy only for thrills and pleasures, as well as those who please them, Albee sees in the theater not only “entertainment”, but also “instruction”, “enlightenment”, while not forgetting about its special aesthetic nature, for which straightforward edification and “frontal” tendentiousness are contraindicated. According to Albee, serious American theater is developing in line with the post-Ibsen and Chekhov traditions. It is also noticeable in Albee. One English critic directly called his play “It’s All Over” “Chekhovian.” In general, Albee is characterized by plasticity of manner, the ability to write in terms of the lyrical, sarcastic, and grotesque. This does not mean that he is empirical and can absorb heterogeneous phenomena like a sponge. His originality lies in his lively, witty dialogue, in his ability to give a trivial and everyday text special significance: to construct a play in such a way that the lack of external drama is more than compensated for by internal energy and musicality.

"What happened at the zoo." Peru Albee owns a series of experimental one-act plays (“American Dream”, American Dream, 1961; “Little Alice”, Tiny Alice, 1965; “Chairman Mao’s Box”, Box and Quatation from Chairman Mao, 1969). Albee's debut - the experimental one-act play "What Happened at the Zoo" (The Zoo Story, 1959) for the first time outlined the playwright's deep theme expressed through a paradoxical plot: the total loneliness of people. There is almost no direct action in the play; it is structured as a kind of dialogue between two “deaf” characters, completely random people.

One of the characters, Jerry, almost confesses to his interlocutor, Peter, but encounters impenetrable misunderstanding and indifference. Jerry is an intellectual, a lonely man, he doesn’t even have photographs of his loved ones. The only person he is sometimes forced to communicate with is his drunkard, who pesters him with her lust. Peter is an ordinary prosperous American, a tradesman, concerned exclusively with his own affairs. He doesn't want to understand anyone else, especially when Jerry starts talking to him about unpleasant life problems. However, the conversation fails. All we hear is Jerry's confused, agitated monologue. Peter only interrupts him three times with the remark: “I don’t understand.” Jerry is eager to tell Peter about what he saw at the zoo. This image is fulfilled deep meaning. The iron cages in which the animals are kept are a metaphor for human existence, a soulless society where everyone is “fenced off from each other by bars.” Jerry's monologue is a kind of cry for help: “A person must communicate with someone.” Therefore, his story about the neighbor’s dog, a hostile creature who eventually begins to understand him, is full of symbolism. After all, Jerry's existence is “a humiliating semblance of a prison.” He can't get through to Peter. The latter does not intend to give Jerry part of the bench: after all, the bench is Peter’s “property”. When Jerry fails to get Peter off the bench, he attacks him in a rage. At the same time, he comes across a knife that Peter bothered to arm himself with. Jerry dies and Peter flees the scene...

The traditional motif of loneliness takes on a poignant note in Albee. Jerry does not look like the traditional “alienated” hero of avant-garde plays: he carries spiritual warmth and, realizing the tragedy of his existence, strives in vain to find connections with other people.

Peter is the living personification of the so-called everyman, the “everyman”, the emblem of the “establishment”, conformism, the “golden mean”: married, two daughters, two televisions, two cats, two parrots, work in a publishing house producing school textbooks, reading respectable Time magazine, eighteen thousand dollars a year in income. It takes shock, pain, Jerry's death for Peter to awaken and think about the fact that behind his decent existence there is spiritual poverty.

“Southern History”: the death of the singer. The Death of Bessie Smith (1960), another one-act drama, is distinguished by its simplicity of plot and social certainty. Everything is specific in it: the South, Memphis, 1937, the time of the Spanish Civil War. Both its documentary basis and indignant pathos correlate with the social drama of the 1930s, which is why it fits so well into the context of America in the “turbulent sixties.”

The famous black singer Bessie Smith, a brilliant blues singer, gets into a car accident in Mississippi. Bleeding, she is taken to a hospital “for whites,” where she is refused help. The nearest hospital “for blacks” is far away. The criminal inaction of white doctors causes the singer’s death from loss of blood.

The target of criticism here is racism. It is deeply ingrained in all pores of the American way of life in its “southern” version. Racism is personified in different faces, but most clearly - in the image of a nurse, a beautiful, self-confident, worthy daughter of her stupid father, a ruined southerner.

Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation

Federal Agency for Education

State Educational Institution of Higher Professional Education "St. Petersburg State Polytechnic University"

Faculty foreign languages

Department of Applied Linguistics

COURSE WORK

on the stylistics of the English language

STYLISTIC FEATURES OF MONOLOGUES OF THE MAIN CHARACTER OF EDWARD ALBEE'S PLAY "WHAT HAPPENED AT THE ZOO"

Completed by a student of group 4264/1

Belokurova Daria

Head: Associate Professor of the Department of Romance-Germanic Languages

Faculty of Foreign Languages ​​Popova N.V.

St. Petersburg 2010

Introduction

Edward Albee. His first play

Theoretical justification of the work

Stylistic analysis of monologue speech in Edward Albee's play "What Happened at the Zoo"

Conclusion

Bibliography

Application

Introduction

Our work is devoted to the study of the stylistic features of monologue speech in one of the early works famous American playwright Edward Albee. The play "What Happened at the Zoo" was first staged more than half a century ago, in 1959, however, like many of Albee's other works ("The Death of Bessie Smith", "The American Ideal", "Not Afraid of Virginia Woolf", "A Precarious Balance" and etc.), still remains interesting to the viewer and is staged on the stage of American, European and Russian theaters. It is difficult to unequivocally determine the reason for the success of this author among audiences and critics. One can only assume that, irritating the viewer’s perception with sometimes unpleasant scenes brought to the point of absurdity, he was able to skillfully show the social and philosophical problem, characteristic of America in the 60s and even more aggravated now. Namely the problem of alienation. If we use the metaphorical image created by Albee himself, we can imagine the world of people who are strangers to each other in the form of a zoo, where everyone sits in their own cage, having neither the opportunity nor the desire to establish any relationships with others. Man is alone in the eternal chaos of life and suffers from it.

Albee's main dramatic tool is monologues. G. Zlobin, in his article devoted to the playwright’s work, calls them “characteristically Olbian thoughtfully torn monologues.” They are huge, confusing, but, nevertheless, they are the ones who give us the opportunity to get to the essence of the character by ridding him of many shells, primarily socially conditioned. As an example, we can cite Jerry’s confession, taken for analysis in this work, which appears in the play under the title “The Story of Jerry and the Dog.”

Our choice of topic is due to the undoubted relevance of Edward Albee’s works and the ambiguity of interpretations of his works by both viewers and critics. Some, analyzing the work of this playwright, classify his plays as absurdist theater, others prove the opposite, classifying many of his works as a realistic movement, and others consider a characteristic feature of his style to be the fusion of these two trends, reflected differently in the works of different years. Such an intriguing versatility of views on the playwright’s work, as well as the contradictory nature of subjective opinions about his work, prompts us to find out what means of expression the author, who has such a strong influence on the public, uses, through what stylistic devices and figures his daring, piercing, and somehow awkward plays affect the viewer.

The stylistic analysis we carried out allows us not only to highlight the main means used by the author for the stylistic organization of the play, but also to show their connection with the monologue type of speech, as well as to justify the choice of certain techniques for expressing the thoughts and feelings of the hero.

Thus, the purpose of our work is to identify the stylistic features of the monologues of the main character in Edward Albee's play "What Happened at the Zoo". To achieve this goal, it is necessary to analyze the main stylistic means inherent in Jerry's monologues, using the example of an excerpt from the central, nuclear monologue of the play, namely "The Story of Jerry and the Dog", to identify the leading trends in the choice stylistic devices and their significance for the perception of the text, and then, on this basis, draw a conclusion about the stylistic design of a monologue speech characteristic of a given playwright.

Edward Albee. His first play

G. Zlobin in his article “The Borderland of Edward Albee” divides all dramatic writers of the 20th century into three sectors: the bourgeois, commercial theater of Broadway and Grand Boulevards, where the main goal of productions is to make a profit; avant-garde theater, which has lost its content in its desire to find a new form, and, finally, a theater of “great collisions and noisy passions,” which turns to various genres and forms, but at the same time does not lose its social importance, a real theater. To this last sector, G. Zlobin includes the work of Edward Albee, a living classic of our time, who has two Tony Awards (1964, 1967) and three Pulitzer Prizes (1966, 1975, 1994), as well as a Kennedy Center award for a fruitful life. life and the National Medal for Achievement in the Arts.

Albee is often characterized as a prominent representative of the theater of the absurd, but it should be noted that there is some inclination towards realism in his plays. The theater of the absurd, as Albee himself understands it, is an art based on existentialist and post-existentialist philosophical concepts that consider man's attempts to make sense of himself. a meaningless existence in a meaningless world. And therefore, in the dramaturgy of the absurd, a person appears to us cut off from the circumstances of the socio-historical context, lonely, confused in the meaninglessness of his life and therefore - “in constant expectation of death - or salvation.” This is how we see Jerry, the main character of the analyzed play “What Happened at the Zoo”; this is how Martha and George from the play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”; this is the general state of most of Albee’s characters.

The absurdist trend in American literature arose on the basis of a general pessimistic mood in the 50-60s. . The consumer society has felt that the old values ​​no longer work, the American dream is just a beautiful illusion that does not bring happiness, and there is nothing to replace these values ​​and illusions. This social despair was reflected in the drama of the fifties of the 20th century in different ways: some tried to restore the illusion, revive faith in miracles and the saving power of love (R. Nash, W. Inge, A. MacLeish, etc.), and Edward Albee with his shocking, socially acute plays, he challenges these illusions, literally forcing the viewer to face the problem, forcing him to think about its solution. What problems does the author pose? It is worth noting that for Albee there is no taboo topics, as evidenced by his latest productions, for example, the play “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?”, which tells about the protagonist’s sincere love for a goat named Sylvia. Homosexuality, bestiality, madness, complicated family relationships - the list of topics covered by the author is quite extensive, all of them, however, can be summed up under common denominator, namely - the theme of human alienation in this world, which is also revealed in the analyzed play. This theme is characteristic not only of Albee’s works, but also of the art of the second half of the 20th century in general (it is worth recalling at least Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Trilogy of Alienation”). The problem of alienation, which has grown to the scale of the tragedy of the century and therefore is so vividly reflected, including in Albee’s works, lies in the inability of people, even if they speak the same language, to understand and accept each other. This is the problem of every person immersed in the vacuum of his loneliness and suffering from it.

Besides that performing arts by definition, is implicitly rich, implying the intense work of the viewer to decode the author's message; in Albee's plays this implicitness is further enhanced due to the fact that there is no logical, understandable speech of the characters containing at least some hint of ways to solve the problem posed, only outlined images with masterful precision and cold objectivity. Moreover, these images are typical characters in typical circumstances, which is one of the distinctive features realism. It is the communication between them that becomes absurd, or rather the attempt to establish contact, which often ends in failure.

Critics note Albee's characteristic view of his characters as if from the outside, his sometimes cruel objectivity in depicting characters. The playwright himself connects this with the way his life worked out: having been adopted in early infancy, despite the wealth of the family that adopted him, he did not feel connected to them. As Albee himself would later say: “I was pleased and relieved when, at around the age of five, I discovered that I was adopted.” (I felt joy and relief when, around the age of five, I discovered that I was adopted) [quote from 10, our translation]. Although it must be admitted that it was his adoptive family that played a decisive role in his future fate as a playwright: Albee's grandfather was part owner of a chain of vaudeville theaters, so guests from the theatrical world were a common occurrence in Albee's home, which undoubtedly influenced his choice to associate himself with the theater.

Relationships in the family were not ideal, and after another quarrel with his mother, Albee left home with the intention of engaging in literary work; he wrote both poetry and prose, but without much success. And during this period of his life, almost driven to despair by his supposed inability to write anything really worthwhile, Albee published his first significant work - the play “What Happened at the Zoo.” This poignant, daring play largely reflects Albee's signature style of plays - with a dark atmosphere and an extremely harsh tone.

According to G. Zlobin, in Albee everything is angular, defiant, and torn. With the furious rhythm of his plays, he mainly achieves an emotional effect, shocking the viewer, not allowing him to remain indifferent. Albee's theatricality is achieved mainly by the intensity of the characters' speech flow, its increased expression and emotionality. The speech is full of irony, sarcasm, and “dark” humor. The characters, as if in a hurry to speak out, either exchange quick remarks in a “clash dialogue”, or express themselves in extensive monologues, which are characterized by a colloquial, everyday style of speech with its clichés, pauses and repetitions, incoherence and inconsistency of thoughts. These monologues, which critics recognize as the main tool of Albee's dramaturgy, allow one to see the inner world of the main characters, in which the contradictions reigning in their minds come to the fore. As a rule, monologues are very emotionally rich, very expressive, which explains the abundance of exclamations, rhetorical questions, ellipses, repetitions, as well as elliptical sentences and parallel constructions. The hero, having decided to express the secret, intimate thing that is in his soul, can no longer stop, he jumps from one to another, thinks, asks his interlocutor and, without waiting for an answer to the question, rushes to continue his confession.

We took an excerpt from this kind of monologue for stylistic analysis from the one-act play “What Happened at the Zoo,” which, as mentioned above, became the playwright’s first serious work. It was staged in West Berlin in 1959, in 1960 the play was staged in America, and within a year in Europe.

There are only two characters in the play, that is, exactly as many as are necessary for dialogue, for the elementary act of communication. The same minimalism can be noted in the decorations: just two garden benches in Central Park in New York. The main characters of the play are the one hundred percent standard family American Peter, to characterize whom Rose A. Zimbardo uses the word “everyman” (ordinary man, everyman), indicating his mediocrity, and the tired, sloppy outcast Jerry, in his own words “an eternal temporary resident” , from whom all personal, family, and kinship ties have been cut off. Their chance meeting in the park becomes fatal both for Jerry, who dies, throwing himself on a knife taken for defense by Peter, and for Peter, who is unlikely to ever forget the picture of this unintentional murder. Between a meeting and a murder (or suicide) is a conversation between these people who have difficulty understanding each other, perhaps because they belong to different social strata of the population, but above all because of a common tragic alienation that calls into question the very possibility of understanding between people, an opportunity to overcome isolation. Jerry's failed attempt to build a relationship with the dog, his desperate desire to "talk for real" with Peter, which ended in tragedy, fit perfectly into the model of the zoo world, where the bars of cages fence off not only people from each other, but also each individual person from himself.

In this play, Edward Albee painted a vivid, shocking picture of the monstrous alienation between people, without, however, trying to analyze it. Thus, the viewer or reader is asked to draw conclusions on their own, since he will not be able to find exact answers in the text of the play. In addition to the fact that Albee does not give answers to questions, he also deviates from a clear motivation for the actions of the characters, therefore, there is always the opportunity to understand his works in one’s own way, and therefore there are different, sometimes opposing opinions of critics interpreting his works.

Theoretical justification of the work

From a stylistic point of view, the following main trends can be identified in the text we are analyzing: the use of conversational style markers, numerous repetitions at the phonetic, lexical and syntactic level, ensuring the coherence of the text and creating a clear rhythmic pattern, as well as increased emotionality of speech, expressed by means such as aposiopesis , exclamatory sentences, emphatic conjunctions, onomatopoeia. The author also uses epithets, metaphors, allusion, antithesis, polysyndeton, which play an important role in describing specific moments, but they cannot be attributed to the most significant trends in the text.

Let us consider the listed features of the author’s style in more detail. Conversational style, the markers of which are quite numerous in the analyzed text, are generated by the oral form of speech, which means that there is direct contact between interlocutors who have the opportunity to clarify the content of the message using non-verbal means of communication (facial expressions, gestures) or intonation. The presence of feedback (even with the silent participation of the interlocutor) allows you to adjust the message as the conversation progresses, which explains why speech is not always logically constructed and there are frequent deviations from the main topic of the conversation. In addition, the speaker does not have time to think about his words for a long time, so he uses his active vocabulary, and when constructing a sentence, he avoids complex syntactic structures. Compound words with a bookish connotation or convoluted complex sentences, when used in colloquial speech, can be considered stylistically significant.

Such communication conditions create the basis for the implementation of two opposing trends, namely compression and redundancy.

Compression can be implemented at various levels of the language system. At the phonetic level, it is expressed in the reduction of auxiliary verbs, for example, it’s, there’s, animals don’t, he wasn’t, etc. At the lexical level, compression is manifested in the predominant use of monomorphemic words (open, stop, look), verbs with postpositives or so-called phrasal verbs (go for, get away), as well as words of broad semantics (thing, staff). In colloquial speech, the syntax is simplified whenever possible, which is expressed in the use of elliptical constructions, for example, “Like this: Grrrrrr!” Ellipsis is interpreted as “translation into implication of a structurally necessary element of construction.” The missing element can be restored by the listener based on the context or on the basis of the standard models of syntactic constructions available in his mind if, for example, an auxiliary verb is missing.

The opposite direction, that is, the tendency towards redundancy, is due to the spontaneity of colloquial speech and is expressed, first of all, in the form of so-called “weedy” words (well, I mean, you see), double negation or repetitions.

In the next trend of repetition of elements, we have combined figures of different levels of language that are quite diverse in structure and stylistic function. Essence repeat consists of “the repetition of sounds, words, morphemes, synonyms or syntactic structures in a series of sufficient closeness, that is, close enough to each other so that they can be noticed.” Repetition at the phonetic level is realized through alliteration, which we, following I.R. Galperin, we will understand it in a broad sense, that is, as a repetition of identical or similar sounds, often consonants, in closely spaced syllables, in particular at the beginning of consecutive words. Thus, we do not divide alliteration into assonance and alliteration proper according to the quality of the repeated sounds (vowels or consonants), and we also do not attach importance to the position of sounds in a word (initial, middle, final).

Alliteration is an example of the use of the author's phonetic means, that is, means that increase the expressiveness of speech and its emotional and aesthetic impact, which are associated with the sound matter of speech through the choice of words and their arrangement and repetitions. The phonetic organization of the text, corresponding to the mood of the message and created using these and other phonetic means, is determined by I.V. Arnold as instrumentation. Repetitions play an important role in instrumentation, as individual sounds, and verbal.

Lexical repetitions, which are the repetition of a word or phrase within one sentence, paragraph or whole text, have a stylistic function only if the reader can notice them during decoding. The usual functions of repetition at the lexical level include intensifying (expressive), emotional and intensifying-emotional. A more precise definition of repetition tasks is possible only taking into account the context in which it is used.

Let us now move on to consider the repetition of units at the syntactic level, which in the analyzed text is presented, first of all, parallelism, interpreted as the similarity or identity of syntactic structure in two or more sentences or parts of a sentence that are in close positions. I.G. Halperin notes that parallel constructions are used, as a rule, in enumeration, antithesis and at the climactic moments of the narrative, thereby increasing the emotional intensity of the latter. It should also be added that with the help of a similar syntactic organization, various stylistic devices that perform equivalent functions are often combined, thereby achieving convergence. In addition, parallelism, like, in principle, any repetition, creates a rhythmic pattern of the text.

The segment of the protagonist’s speech we are considering represents the story of his life, the development of his worldview, and, therefore, can be interpreted as a confession, the secrecy of which causes high emotional tension. Emotionality can be conveyed in a text in various ways; in our case, the main means of expressing a character’s emotion is aposiopesis, consisting of an emotional break in the statement, expressed graphically by an ellipsis. With aposiopesis, the speaker cannot continue his speech due to real or feigned excitement or indecision, in contrast to a similar silence, when the listener is invited to guess for himself what was left unsaid. In addition to aposiopesis, the emotional background and dynamics of speech are created using onomatopoeia, understood as “the use of words whose phonetic composition resembles the objects and phenomena named in these words,” as well as emphatic conjunctions, usually found at the beginning of a sentence.

In addition to the three trends discussed, it should also be noted graphic deviations, present in the analyzed text. In accordance with the rules of grammar, the first word of the text is written with a capital letter, as well as the first word after the ellipsis point, question mark and exclamation mark that ends the sentence, and different types proper names. In other cases, the use of capital letters is considered a violation language norm and can be interpreted as stylistically relevant. For example, as I.V. points out. Arnold, writing whole words or phrases in capital letters means pronouncing them with special emphasis or especially loudly. As a rule, the stylistic function of various graphic deviations varies depending on the context and intention of the author, so it is more convenient and logical to highlight it for each specific case.

The passage taken for stylistic analysis also contains epithets, which are considered as figurative definitions that perform an attributive function or adverbial function in a sentence. An epithet is characterized by the presence of emotive, expressive and other connotations, thanks to which the author’s attitude towards the defined subject is expressed. There are different types of epithets: constant, tautological, explanatory, metaphorical, metonymic, phrasal, inverted, displaced and others. Explanatory epithets indicate some important feature of the thing being defined that characterizes it (for example, unvalued jewels). Inverted ones are emphatic attributive constructions with resubordination (for example, “a devil of a sea”, where the referent of the phrase is not “devil”, but “sea”). Such structures are expressive and stylistically marked as colloquial. We do not consider other types of epithets separately due to the fact that they are not used by the author in the selected text. Epithets can be located both in preposition and in postposition to the word being defined, and in the second case, which is less common, they certainly attract the reader’s attention, which means they are aesthetically effective and emotionally charged.

Let us give definitions of other stylistic devices encountered in the analyzed passage. Metaphor usually defined as a hidden comparison made by applying the name of one object to another and thus revealing some important feature of the second (for example, using the word flame instead of love on the basis of the strength of feeling, its ardor and passion). In other words, a metaphor is the transfer of the name of one object to another based on similarity. There are figurative (poetic) and linguistic (erased) metaphors. The former are unexpected for the reader, while the latter have long been fixed in the language system (for example, a ray of hope, floods of tears, etc.) and are no longer perceived as stylistically significant.

Allusion - it is an indirect reference in speech or writing to historical, literary, mythological, biblical facts or to facts of everyday life, usually without indicating the source. It is assumed that the reader knows where the word or phrase is borrowed from and tries to correlate it with the content of the text, thus decoding the author's message.

Under antithesis is understood as “a sharp opposition of concepts and images that creates contrast.” As noted by I.G. Halperin, antithesis is most often found in parallel constructions, since it is easier for the reader to perceive opposed elements in similar syntactic positions.

Polysindeton or polyunion is a strong means of enhancing the expressiveness of an utterance. The use of a polyunion when listing shows that it is not exhaustive, that is, the series is not closed, and each element attached by a union is highlighted, which makes the phrase more expressive and rhythmic.

Throughout the analysis, we will repeatedly mention the rhythmic pattern of Jerry's monologue. Rhythm is a phenomenon that is more clearly expressed in poetry, but the rhythmic organization of prose is no exception. Rhythm is called “any uniform alternation, for example, acceleration and deceleration, stressed and unstressed syllables, and even the repetition of images and thoughts.” In literature, the speech basis of rhythm is syntax. The rhythm of prose is based primarily on the repetition of images, themes and other large elements of the text, on parallel constructions, and on the use of sentences with homogeneous members. It affects the emotional perception of the reader, and can also serve as a visual means when creating any image.

The greatest stylistic effect is achieved by the accumulation of techniques and figures and their interaction in the message as a whole. Therefore, when analyzing, it is important to take into account not only the functions of individual techniques, but also to consider their mutual influence on a certain passage of text. The concept of convergence, as a type of advancement, allows you to take your analysis to a higher level. Convergence called the convergence in one place of a bunch of stylistic devices participating in a single stylistic function. Interacting, stylistic devices set off each other, thereby ensuring the text’s noise immunity. Protecting the message from interference during convergence is based on the phenomenon of redundancy, which in a literary text also increases expressiveness, emotionality and overall aesthetic impression.

We will conduct a stylistic analysis of Jerry's monologue from the reader, that is, based on the provisions of the stylistics of perception or the stylistics of decoding. The focus in this case is on the impact that the organization of the test itself has on the reader, rather than on the driving forces of the writer's creative process. We consider this approach more suitable for our research, since it does not involve preliminary literary analysis, and also makes it possible to go beyond the author’s intended intentions when analyzing.

Stylistic analysis of monologue speech in Edward Albee's play "What Happened at the Zoo"

For stylistic analysis, we took an excerpt from the play, which, when staged, will be interpreted in one way or another by the actors involved in it, each of whom will add something of their own to the images created by Albee. However, such variability in the perception of the work is limited, since the main characteristics of the characters, their manner of speech, the atmosphere of the work can be traced directly in the text of the play: these can be the author’s remarks regarding the utterance of individual phrases or movements accompanying the speech (for example, , or , as well as the speech itself , its graphic, phonetic, lexical and syntactic design. It is the analysis of such design, aimed at identifying similar characteristics expressed by various stylistic means, that is the main goal of our research.

The analyzed episode is a spontaneous, expressive, dialogic monologue characteristic of Albee, with strong emotional intensity. The dialogue nature of Jerry's monologue implies that it is addressed to Peter; the whole story is told as if a dialogue is being conducted between these two people with Peter's silent participation in it. The conversational style, in particular, is proof of this.

Based on the results of a preliminary analysis of the selected passage, we compiled comparison table stylistic devices used in it, arranging them according to frequency of use in the text.

Frequency of use of stylistic devices

Name of stylistic device	Number of uses	Percentage of use
Conversational style markers
Auxiliary verb reduction
Phrasal verb
Onomatopoeia
Interjection
Other conversational style markers
Aposiopesis
Lexical repetition
Alliteration
Parallel design
Union with the emphatic function
Ellipsis
Graphic deviation
Exclamation
Metaphor
grammatical deviation
A rhetorical question
Antithesis
Polysindeton
Oxymoron

As can be seen from the table above, the most widely used stylistic devices are conversational style markers, aposiopesis, lexical repetitions, alliteration, epithets, as well as parallel constructions.

As a separate item in the table, we have highlighted conversational style markers, which are very diverse in nature, but united by the common function of creating an atmosphere of informal communication. Quantitatively, there were more such markers than other means, but we can hardly consider Jerry’s colloquial style of speech as the leading trend in the stylistic design of the text; rather, it is the background against which other trends appear with greater intensity. However, in our opinion, the choice of this particular style is stylistically relevant, so we will consider it in detail.

The colloquial literary style to which this passage belongs was chosen by the author, in our opinion, in order to bring Jerry’s speech closer to reality, to show his excitement when delivering the speech, and also to emphasize its dialogical nature, and therefore Jerry’s attempt to “talk.” present”, to establish a relationship with a person. The text uses numerous markers of conversational style, which can be attributed to two interdependent and at the same time contradictory trends - the tendency towards redundancy and the tendency towards compression. The first is expressed by the presence of such “weedy” words as “I think I told you”, “yes”, “what I mean is”, “you know”, “sort of”, “well”. These words create the feeling that speech is characterized by uneven speed of pronunciation: Jerry seems to slow down his speech a little at these words, perhaps to emphasize the following words (as, for example, in the case of “what I mean is”) or trying to gather your thoughts. In addition, they, along with such colloquial expressions as “half-assed”, “kicked free”, “that was that” or “bolted upstairs”, add spontaneity, spontaneity and, of course, emotionality to Jerry’s monologue.

The tendency toward compression characteristic of the colloquial style manifests itself in various ways at the phonetic, lexical and syntactic levels of the language. The use of a truncated form, that is, reduction of auxiliary verbs, for example “it’s”, “there’s”, “don’t”, “wasn’t” and others, is a characteristic feature of colloquial speech and once again emphasizes Jerry’s informal tone. From a lexical point of view, the phenomenon of compression can be examined using the example of the use of such phrasal verbs as “go for”, “got away”, “went on”, “pack up”, “tore into”, “got back”, “threw away”, "thought about it up". They create an informal communication environment, revealing the closeness expressed in language between the participants in communication, contrasting with the lack of internal closeness between them. It seems to us that in this way Jerry seeks to create conditions for a frank conversation, for confession, for which formality and neutral coldness are unacceptable, since we are talking about the most important, the most intimate for the hero.

At the syntactic level, compression finds expression in elliptical constructions. For example, in the text we encounter sentences such as “Like this: Grrrrrrr!” "Like so!" “Cosy.”, which have great emotional potential, which, realized together with other stylistic means, conveys Jerry’s excitement, abruptness and sensual fullness of his speech.

Before moving on to a step-by-step analysis of the text, we note, based on the data of quantitative analysis, the presence of some leading trends inherent in the monologue of the main character. These include: repetition of elements at the phonetic (alliteration), lexical (lexical repetition) and syntactic (parallelism) levels, increased emotionality, expressed primarily by aposiopesis, as well as rhythmicity, not reflected in the table, but largely inherent in the text under consideration . We will refer to these three nuclear trends throughout the analysis.

So let's turn to detailed analysis text. From the very beginning of Jerry's story, the reader is prepared for something significant, since Jerry himself considers it necessary to title his story, thereby separating it from the entire conversation into a separate story. According to the author's remark, he pronounces this title as if reading the inscription on a billboard - "THE STORY OF JERRY AND THE DOG!" The graphic organization of this phrase, namely its design in capital letters only and an exclamation mark at the end, somewhat clarifies the remark - each word is pronounced loudly, clearly, solemnly, prominently. It seems to us that this solemnity takes on a tinge of ironic pathos, since the sublime form does not coincide with the mundane content. On the other hand, the title itself looks more like the title of a fairy tale, which correlates with Jerry's address to Peter at a certain moment as a child who can't wait to find out what happened at the zoo: "JERRY: because after I tell you about the dog, do you know what then? Then. then I"ll tell you about what happened at the zoo."

Although, as we noted, this text refers to conversational style, which is characterized by simplicity of syntactic structures, already the first sentence is a very confusing set of words: “What I am going to tell you has something to do with how sometimes it”s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly; or, maybe I only think that it has something to do with that." The presence of words such as “something”, “sometimes”, “maybe” gives the phrase a shade of uncertainty, vagueness, and abstractness. The hero seems to be responding with this sentence to his thoughts that were not expressed, which can explain the beginning of the next sentence with the emphatic conjunction “but”, which interrupts his reasoning, returning directly to the story. It should be noted that this sentence contains two parallel constructions, the first of which is “has something to do.” with" frames the second "to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly". The first construction is a repetition at both the syntactic and lexical, and therefore at the phonetic levels. Its identity reverses the reader’s attention to the preceding elements of the phrase, namely “what I am going to tell you” and “maybe I only think that it”, and encourages us to compare them. When comparing these elements, we observe Jerry’s loss of confidence that he understood correctly. meaning of what happened to him, doubt is heard in his voice, which he tries to suppress by starting a new thought. The conscious interruption of reflection is clearly felt in the initial “but” of the next sentence.

Other parallel constructions of the second sentence can be summarized by the following model "go / come back (verbs both expressing movement, but in different directions) + a + long / short (antonymous definitions) + distance + out of way / correctly (adverbs of manner of action, which are contextual antonyms)." As we see, these two identically constructed phrases are contrasted in their lexical meaning, which creates a stylistic effect: reader thinks about the statement made, looks for the implied meaning in it. We don’t yet know what will be discussed next, but we can guess about the possible duality of this expression, because the word “distance” can mean the real distance between objects of reality (for example, to the zoo). ), and the segment life path. Thus, although we do not understand what exactly Jerry meant, we, based on the syntactic and lexical emphasis, feel the parting tone of the phrase and can assert the undoubted importance of this thought for Jerry himself. The second sentence, mainly due to its similarity in tone and construction with folk wisdom or a saying, can be perceived as the subtitle of a story about a dog, revealing its main idea.

Using the following sentence as an example, it is interesting to consider the stylistic function of using ellipses, since they will appear more than once in the text. Jerry says that he walked north, then - a pause (ellipsis), and he corrects himself - in a northern direction, again a pause (ellipsis): "I walked north. northerly, rather. until I came here." In our opinion, in this context, ellipsis is a graphic way of expressing aposiopesis. We can imagine that Jerry sometimes stops and collects his thoughts, trying to remember exactly how he walked, as if much depends on it; In addition, he is, in all likelihood, in a state of strong emotional upsurge, excitement, like a person telling something extremely important to him, and therefore often gets confused, unable to speak from excitement.

In this sentence, in addition to aposiopesis, one can also identify partial lexical repetition (“north ... northerly”), parallel constructions (“it”s why I went to the zoo today, and why I walked north”) and two cases of alliteration (repetition of the consonant sound [t] and the long vowel [o:]). connected by the conjunction “and”. It seems to us that such instrumentation of the statement creates a certain contrast between the speed and inflexibility of Jerry’s decision to go to the zoo (sound [t]) and the length of his road in the north direction (sounds [o:] and [n]), emphasized by partial lexical repetition. Thanks to the convergence of the listed stylistic devices and figures, their mutual clarification, the following picture is created: as a result of thinking about the situation that Jerry is going to talk about, he decides to go to the zoo, and this decision is characterized by spontaneity and some abruptness, and then wanders slowly in a northerly direction, perhaps hoping to meet someone.

With the words “All right”, which have a functional and stylistic connotation that relates them to colloquial speech, the author begins the creation of one of the key images of the play - the image of a dog. Let's look at it in detail. The first characteristic that Jerry gives to the dog is expressed by the inverted epithet “a black monster of a beast”, where the denoted is “beast”, that is, the dog denoting “black monster”, the basis of comparison, in our opinion, is the formidable, possibly sinister looking animal with black fur. It should be noted that the word beast has a bookish connotation and, according to the Longman Exams Coach dictionary, contains the semes “big” and “dangerous” (“an animal, especially a large or dangerous one”), which, undoubtedly, together with the expressiveness of the word “monster” , adds expressiveness to the designated epithet.

Then, after general definition, the author reveals the image of a black monster, clarifies it with expressive details: “an oversized head, tiny, tiny ears, and eyes. bloodshot, infected, maybe; and a body you can see the ribs through the skin.” Placed after a colon, these nouns can be interpreted as a series of homogeneous direct objects, but due to the lack of a verb to which they could refer (suppose the beginning might be "he had an oversized head..."), they are perceived as a series name sentences. This creates a visual effect, increases the expressiveness and emotionality of the phrase, and also plays a significant role in creating a rhythmic pattern. The double use of the conjunction “and” allows us to speak of polysyndeton, which smoothes out the completeness of the enumeration, making a series of homogeneous members seem open, and at the same time fixes attention on each of the elements of this series. Thus, it seems that the dog is not fully described; there is still a lot that would be worth talking about in order to complete the picture of the terrible black monster. Thanks to polysyndeton and the absence of a generalizing verb, a strong position is created for the elements of enumeration, psychologically especially noticeable for the reader, which is also strengthened by the presence of alliteration, represented by a repeating sound in the words oversized, tiny, eyes.

Let us consider the four elements identified in this way, each of which is specified by a definition. The head is described using the epithet "oversized", in which the prefix "over-" means "over-", that is, it gives the impression of a disproportionately large head, contrasting with the tiny ears described by the repeated epithet "tiny". The word “tiny” itself means something very small and is translated into Russian as “miniature, tiny”, but reinforced by repetition, it makes the dog’s ears unusually, fabulously small, which strengthens the already sharp contrast with a huge head, framed by antithesis.

The eyes are described as “bloodshot, infected”, and it should be noted that both of these epithets are in postposition to the word being defined after the aposiopesis marked with an ellipsis, which enhances their expressiveness. "Bloodshot", that is, filled with blood, implies red, one of the dominant colors, as we will see later, in the description of the animal, thus, it seems to us, the effect of its similarity with the hellish dog Cerberus, guarding the gates of hell, is achieved. In addition, although Jerry clarifies that perhaps the cause is an infection, bloodshot eyes are still associated with anger, malice, and to some extent, madness.

The convergence of stylistic devices in this short piece of text allows us to create an image of a madman, aggressive dog, the absurdity and absurdity of which, expressed by the antithesis, immediately catches the eye.

I would like to once again draw attention to how masterfully Albee creates a tangible rhythm in his prose. At the end of the sentence in question, the dog’s body is described using the attributive clause “you can see the ribs through the skin,” which is not connected to the attributive word “body” by a conjunction or allied word, thus the rhythm specified at the beginning of the sentence is not violated.

The black-red palette when describing the dog is emphasized by the author with the help of lexical repetitions and alliteration in the following sentence: “The dog is black, all black; all black except for the bloodshot eyes, and. yes. and an open sore on its. right forepaw; that is red, too." The sentence is divided into two parts not only by ellipses expressing aposiopesis, but also by various alliterations: in the first case, these are repeated consonant sounds, in the second, a vowel sound. The first part repeats what the reader already knew, but with greater expressiveness created by the lexical repetition of the word “black”. In the second, after some pause and a double “and”, creating tension in the statement, a new detail is introduced, which, thanks to the reader’s preparation by the previous phrase, is perceived very brightly - a red wound on the right paw.

It should be noted that here we are again faced with an analogue of a nominal sentence, that is, the existence of this wound is stated, but there is no indication of its connection with the dog, it exists, as it were, separately. Creating the same effect is achieved in the phrase “there’s a grey-yellow-white color, too, when he bares his fangs.” The very syntactic construction like “there is / there are” implies the existence of an object / phenomenon in some area of ​​space or time, color “exists” here, which makes this color something separate, independent of its wearer. Such “separateness” of details does not interfere with the perception of the dog as a holistic image, but gives it greater prominence and expressiveness.

The epithet “grey-yellow-white” defines the color as blurry, unclear in comparison with the bright saturation of the previous ones (black, red). It is interesting to note that this epithet, despite its complexity, sounds like one word and is pronounced in one breath, thus describing the color not as a combination of several shades, but as one specific, understandable to every reader, color of the animal’s fangs, covered with a yellowish coating. This is achieved, in our opinion, by smooth phonetic transitions from stem to stem: the stem gray ends with the sound [j], from which the next one begins, yellow, the final diphthong of which practically merges with the subsequent [w] in the word white.

Jerry is very excited when telling this story, which is expressed in the confusion and increasing emotionality of his speech. The author shows this through the extensive use of aposiopesis, the use of colloquial inclusions with interjection, such as “oh, yes,” emphatic conjunctions “and” at the beginning of sentences, as well as onomatopoeia, formed into the exclamatory sentence “Grrrrrrrr!”

Albee practically does not use metaphors in the monologue of his main character; in the analyzed passage we encountered only two cases, one of which is an example of an erased linguistic metaphor (“trouser leg”), and the second (“monster”) refers to the creation of the image of a dog and in to some extent repeats the already mentioned inverted epithet (“monster of the beast”). The use of the same word “monster” is a means of maintaining the internal integrity of the text, as, in general, is any repetition accessible to the reader’s perception. However, its contextual meaning is somewhat different: in an epithet, due to combination with the word beast, it takes on the meaning of something negative, frightening, while in a metaphor, when combined with the epithet “poor”, the absurdity, incongruity and sick state of the animal comes to the fore , this image is also supported by the explanatory epithets “old” and “misused”. Jerry is confident that the dog's current condition is the result of people's bad attitude towards him, and not manifestations of his character, that, in essence, the dog is not to blame for the fact that he is so scary and pathetic (the word "misused" can be translated literally as " incorrectly used", this is the second participle, which means it has a passive meaning). This confidence is expressed by the adverb “certainly”, as well as the emphatic auxiliary verb “do” before the word “believe”, which violates the usual pattern of constructing an affirmative sentence, thereby making it unusual for the reader, and therefore more expressive.

It is curious that a significant part of the pauses occur precisely in that part of the story where Jerry describes the dog - 8 out of 17 cases of the use of aposiopesis came across us in this relatively small segment of the text. Perhaps this is explained by the fact that, starting his confession, main character very excited, first of all, by his decision to express everything, so his speech is confused and a little illogical, and only then, gradually, this excitement smoothes out. One can also assume that the very memory of this dog, which once meant so much for Jerry’s worldview, excites him, which is reflected directly in his speech.

Thus, key image The dog is created by the author using “colored” language frames, each of which reflects one of its features. The mixture of black, red and gray-yellow-white is associated with a mixture of menacing, incomprehensible (black), aggressive, furious, hellish, sick (red) and old, spoiled, “misused” (gray-yellow-white). A very emotional, confusing description of the dog is created with the help of pauses, emphatic conjunctions, nominative constructions, as well as all kinds of repetitions.

If at the beginning of the story the dog seemed to us like a black monster with red, inflamed eyes, then gradually he begins to acquire almost human traits: It’s not for nothing that Jerry uses the pronoun “he” in relation to him, not “it”, and at the end of the analyzed text he uses the word “face” to refer to “face” (“He turned his face back to the hamburgers”). Thus, the line between animals and humans is erased, they are placed on the same level, which is supported by the character’s phrase “animals are indifferent to me... like people.” The case of aposiopesis presented here is caused, in our opinion, not by excitement, but by the desire to emphasize this sad fact of the similarity of people and animals, their internal distance from all living beings, which leads us to the problem of alienation in general.

The phrase “like Saint Francis had birds hanging off him all the time” is highlighted by us as a historical allusion, but it can be considered both as a comparison and as irony, since here Jerry contrasts himself with Francis of Assisi, one of the most revered Catholic saints, but uses for him descriptions of the colloquial verb “hang off” and the exaggerated “all the time”, that is, it detracts from the serious content with a frivolous form of expression, which creates a somewhat ironic effect. The allusion enhances the expressiveness of the conveyed idea of ​​Jerry’s alienation, and also performs a characterological function, describing the main character as a fairly educated person.

From the generalization, Jerry returns to his story again, and again, as in the third sentence, as if interrupting his thoughts out loud, he uses the emphatic conjunction “but”, after which he begins to talk about the dog. The following is a description of how the interaction between the dog and the main character took place. It is necessary to note the dynamism and rhythm of this description, created with the help of lexical repetitions (such as “stumbly dog ​​... stumbly run”, as well as the verb “got” repeated four times), alliteration (the sound [g] in the phrase “go for me, to get one of my legs") and a parallel construction ("He got a piece of my trouser leg... he got that..."). The predominance of voiced consonants (101 out of 156 consonants in the segment “From the very beginning ... so that was that”) also creates a feeling of dynamics and liveliness of the narrative.

There is a curious play on words with the lexeme “leg”: the dog intended “to get one of my legs”, but the result was that he “got a piece of my trouser leg”. As you can see, the constructions are almost identical, which creates the feeling that the dog has finally achieved his goal, but the word “leg” is used in the second case in the metaphorical sense of “trouser leg,” which is clarified by the subsequent verb “mended.” Thus, on the one hand, the coherence of the text is achieved, and on the other hand, the smoothness and consistency of perception is disrupted, to some extent irritating the reader or viewer.

Trying to describe the way the dog moved when it pounced on him, Jerry goes through several epithets, trying to find the right one: “Not like he was rabid, you know; he was sort of a stumbly dog, but he wasn’t half-assed, either. It was a good, stumbly run...” As we see, the hero is trying to find something in between “rabid” and “half-assed”, so he introduces the neologism “stumbly”, implying, in all likelihood, a slightly stumbling, uncertain gait or run (conclusion that the word “stumbly” is an author’s neologism was made by us on the basis of its absence in the dictionary Longman Exams Coach, UK, 2006). gaits to the entire object. The repetition of this epithet with different nouns within two closely spaced sentences is, in our opinion, the purpose of clarifying its meaning, making the use of the newly introduced word transparent, and also focusing the reader’s attention on it, since it is important for characterizing the dog, him. disproportionality, absurdity.

The phrase "Cosy. So." we defined it as an ellipse, since there is no doubt in in this case the omission of the main members of the sentence appears. However, it should be noted that it cannot be supplemented from the surrounding context or based on linguistic experience. Such fragmentary impressions of the main character, not related to the context, once again emphasize the confusion of his speech, and, in addition, confirm our idea that he sometimes seems to be responding to his thoughts, hidden from the reader.

olby monologue stylistic device

The following sentence is an example of double alliteration, created by the repetition of two consonant sounds [w] and [v] in one segment of speech. Since these sounds are different in both quality and place of articulation, but sound similar, the sentence is a bit like a tongue twister or saying, in which the deep meaning is framed in an easy-to-remember, attention-grabbing form. Particularly noticeable is the pair “whenever” - “never when”, both elements of which consist of almost identical sounds, arranged in different sequences. It seems to us that this phonetically confusing phrase, which has a slightly ironic overtone, serves to express the confusion and confusion, chaoticity and absurdity of the situation that developed between Jerry and the dog. She sets up the next statement, “That’s funny,” but Jerry immediately corrects himself: “Or, it was funny.” Thanks to this lexical repetition, framed in equivalent syntactic constructions with different tenses of the verb “to be,” the reader becomes aware of the tragedy of the very situation that once before could be laughed at. The expressiveness of this expression is based on a sharp transition from a light, frivolous to a serious perception of what happened. It seems that a lot of time has passed since then, a lot has changed, including Jerry’s attitude towards life.

The sentence “I decided: First, I”ll kill the dog with kindness, and if that doesn’t work. I”ll just kill him.”, expressing the main character’s train of thought, requires special consideration. As we can see, thanks to the convergence of stylistic devices, such as lexical repetition, oxymoron (“kill with kindness”), parallel constructions, aposiopesis, as well as phonetic similarity of expressions, this sentence becomes stylistically striking, thereby drawing the reader’s attention to its semantic content. It should be noted that the word “kill” is repeated. twice in approximately similar syntactic positions, but with a semantic variation: in the first case we are dealing with the figurative meaning of this verb, which can be expressed in Russian “to amaze, delight”, and in the second - with its direct meaning “to deprive of life”. Having reached the second “kill”, the reader automatically in the first fraction of a second perceives it in the same softened figurative meaning as the previous one, therefore, when he realizes true meaning of this word, the effect of the direct meaning is multiplied many times over, it shocks both Peter and the audience or readers. In addition, the aposiopesis that precedes the second “kill” emphasizes the words that follow it, further exacerbating their impact.

Rhythm, as a means of organizing the text, allows us to achieve its integrity and better perception by the reader. A clear rhythmic pattern can be seen, for example, in the following sentence: “So, the next day I went out and bought a bag of hamburgers, medium rare, no catsup, no onion.” It is obvious that here the rhythm is created through the use of alliteration (sounds [b] and [g]), syntactic repetition, as well as the general brevity of the construction of subordinate clauses (meaning the absence of conjunctions, it could be like this: “which are of medium rare” or "in which there's no catsup."). Rhythm allows you to more vividly convey the dynamics of the described actions.

We have already looked at repetition as a means of creating rhythm and maintaining the integrity of the text, but the functions of repetition are not limited to this. For example, in the phrase "When I got back to the rooming-house the dog was waiting for me. I half opened the door that led into the entrance hall, and there he was; waiting for me." the repetition of the element “waiting for me” gives the reader a feeling of building anticipation, as if the dog had been waiting for the main character for a long time. In addition, one feels the inevitability of the meeting, the tension of the situation.

The last point I would like to highlight is the description of the actions of the dog to whom Jerry offers hamburger meat. To create dynamics, the author uses lexical repetitions (“snarled”, “then faster”), alliteration of the sound [s], combining all actions into one uninterrupted chain, as well as syntactic organization - rows of homogeneous predicates connected by a non-union connection. It’s interesting to see what verbs Jerry uses to describe the dog’s reaction: “snarled”, “stopped snarling”, “sniffed”, “moved slowly”, “looked at me”, “turned his face”, “smelled”, “sniffed”, "tore into". As you can see, the most expressive of the presented phrasal verb“tore into”, which comes after the onomatopoeia and is highlighted by the pause preceding it, completes the description, most likely characterizing the wild nature of the dog. Due to the fact that the previous verbs, with the exception of “looked at me,” contain a fricative [s], they are combined in our minds as preparation verbs and thus express the dog’s caution, perhaps his distrust of the stranger, but at the same time we feel a burning desire in him to eat the meat offered to him as quickly as possible, which is expressed by the repeated impatient “then faster.” Thus, judging by the design of the last sentences of our analysis, we can come to the conclusion that, despite his hunger and his “wildness,” the dog is still very wary of the treat offered by a stranger. That is, no matter how strange it may seem, he is afraid. This fact is significant from the point of view that alienation between living beings can be maintained by fear. According to the text, we can say that Jerry and the dog are afraid of each other, so understanding between them is impossible.

So, since repeating meanings and stylistic means turn out to be the most important stylistically, based on the analysis we can conclude that the main trends used by Edward Albee to organize the monologue speech of the main character are all kinds of repetitions at different linguistic levels, the rhythm of speech with its alternation of tense moments and relaxations, emotionally charged pauses and a system of interconnected epithets.

Conclusion

The play What Happened at the Zoo, written in the second half of the 20th century by the famous modern playwright Edward Albee, is a very sharp criticism modern society. Somewhere funny, ironic, somewhere incongruous, torn, and somewhere frankly shocking to the reader, it allows you to feel the depth of the gulf between people who are incapable of understanding.

From a stylistic point of view, the most interesting is the monologue speech of the main character, Jerry, for whom it serves as a means to reveal his most secret thoughts and expose the contradictions in his mind. Jerry's speech can be defined as a dialogized monologue, since throughout its entire length the reader feels Peter's silent participation in it, which can be judged by the author's remarks, as well as by Jerry's own remarks.

Our stylistic analysis of Jerry’s monologue excerpt allows us to identify the following leading trends in the organization of the text:

) conversational style of speech, which is a stylistically relevant background for the implementation of other expressive and figurative means;

2) repetitions at the phonetic, lexical and syntactic levels of the language, expressed by alliteration, lexical repetition, complete or partial, and parallelism, respectively;

) increased emotionality, expressed through aposiopesis, exclamatory sentences, as well as interjections and emphatic conjunctions;

) the presence of a system of interrelated epithets used primarily to describe the dog;

) rhythmicity due to repetition, primarily at the syntactic level;

) integrity and at the same time “tattered” text, illustrating the sometimes inconsistent train of thought of the main character.

Thus, the monologue speech of the main character of the play is very expressive and emotional, but is characterized by some incoherence and inconsistency of thoughts, thereby the author may be trying to prove the failure of language as a means of ensuring understanding between people.

Bibliography

1. Arnold I.V. Stylistics. Modern English language: Textbook for universities. - 4th ed., rev. and additional - M.: Flinta: Nauka, 2002. - 384 p.

2. Albee E. Material from Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia [Electronic resource]: Access mode: #"600370.files/image001.gif">

Edward Albee

What happened at the zoo

Play in one act

CHARACTERS

Peter

about forty years old, neither fat nor thin, neither handsome nor ugly. He wears a tweed suit and horn-rimmed glasses. Smoking a pipe. And although he, so to speak, is already entering average age, his clothing style and demeanor are almost youthful.

Jerry

about forty years old, dressed not so much poorly as sloppily. The once toned, muscular figure begins to grow fat. Now he cannot be called beautiful, but traces of his former attractiveness are still visible quite clearly. The heavy gait and sluggish movements are not explained by promiscuity; If you look closely, you can see that this man is immensely tired.

Central Park in New York; summer sunday. Two garden benches on both sides of the stage, behind them are bushes, trees, the sky. Peter is sitting on the right bench. He is reading a book. He puts the book on his lap, wipes his glasses and goes back to reading. Jerry enters.

Jerry. I was now at the zoo.

Peter doesn't pay attention to him.

I say, I was just at the zoo. MISTER, I WAS AT THE ZOO!

Peter. Eh?.. What?.. Excuse me, are you telling me?..

Jerry. I was at the zoo, then I walked until I ended up here. Tell me, did I go north?

Peter (puzzled). To the north?.. Yes... Probably. Let me figure it out.

Jerry (points a finger into the audience). Is this Fifth Avenue?

Peter. This? Yes of course.

Jerry. What kind of street is this that crosses it? That one on the right?

Peter. The one over there? Oh, this is the Seventy-four.

Jerry. And the zoo is near Sixty-fifth, which means I was going north.

Peter (he can't wait to get back to reading). Yes, apparently so.

Jerry. Good old north.

Peter (almost mechanically). Haha.

Jerry (after a pause). But not directly north.

Peter. I... Well, yes, not directly north. So to speak, in a northern direction.

Jerry (watches as Peter, trying to get rid of him, fills his pipe). Do you want to give yourself lung cancer?

Peter (not without irritation he glances at him, but then smiles). No sir. You won't make any money from this.

Jerry. That's right, sir. Most likely, you will get cancer in your mouth and you will have to insert something like Freud had after he had half his jaw removed. What are they called, these things?

Peter (reluctantly). Prosthesis?

Jerry. Exactly! Prosthesis. You are an educated person, aren't you? Are you by any chance a doctor?

Peter. No, I just read about it somewhere. I think it was in Time magazine. (Takes up the book.)

Jerry. In my opinion, Time magazine is not for idiots.

Peter. I think so too.

Jerry (after a pause). It's very good that Fifth Avenue is there.

Peter (absently). Yes.

Jerry. I can't stand the western part of the park.

Peter. Yes? (Carefully, but with a glimmer of interest.) Why?

Jerry (casually). I don't know myself.

Peter. A! (He buried himself in the book again.)

Jerry (looks at Peter silently until Peter, embarrassed, looks up at him). Maybe we should talk? Or don't you want to?

Peter (with obvious reluctance). No... why not?

Jerry. I see you don't want to.

Peter (puts down the book, takes the pipe out of his mouth. Smiling). No, really, it’s my pleasure.

Jerry. It's not worth it if you don't want to.

Peter (finally decisively). Not at all, I'm very happy.

Jerry. What's his name... Today is a nice day.

Peter (looking up at the sky unnecessarily). Yes. Very nice. Wonderful.

Jerry. And I was at the zoo.

Peter. Yes, I think you already said... didn't you?

Jerry. Tomorrow you will read about it in the newspapers, if you don’t see it on TV in the evening. You probably have a TV?

For stylistic analysis, we took an excerpt from the play, which, when staged, will be interpreted in one way or another by the actors involved in it, each of whom will add something of their own to the images created by Albee. However, such variability in the perception of the work is limited, since the main characteristics of the characters, their manner of speech, the atmosphere of the work can be traced directly in the text of the play: these can be the author’s remarks regarding the utterance of individual phrases or movements accompanying the speech (for example, , or , as well as the speech itself , its graphic, phonetic, lexical and syntactic design. It is the analysis of such design, aimed at identifying similar characteristics expressed by various stylistic means, that is the main goal of our research.

The analyzed episode is a spontaneous, expressive, dialogic monologue characteristic of Albee, with strong emotional intensity. The dialogue nature of Jerry's monologue implies that it is addressed to Peter; the whole story is told as if a dialogue is being conducted between these two people with Peter's silent participation in it. The conversational style, in particular, is proof of this.

Based on the results of a preliminary analysis of the selected passage, we compiled a comparative table of the stylistic devices used in it, ranking them by frequency of use in the text.

Frequency of use of stylistic devices

Name of stylistic device	Number of uses	Percentage of use
Conversational style markers
Auxiliary verb reduction
Phrasal verb
Onomatopoeia
Interjection
Other conversational style markers
Aposiopesis
Lexical repetition
Alliteration
Parallel design
Union with the emphatic function
Ellipsis
Graphic deviation
Exclamation
Metaphor
grammatical deviation
A rhetorical question
Antithesis
Polysindeton
Oxymoron

As can be seen from the table above, the most widely used stylistic devices are conversational style markers, aposiopesis, lexical repetitions, alliteration, epithets, as well as parallel constructions.

As a separate item in the table, we have highlighted conversational style markers, which are very diverse in nature, but united by the common function of creating an atmosphere of informal communication. Quantitatively, there were more such markers than other means, but we can hardly consider Jerry’s colloquial style of speech as the leading trend in the stylistic design of the text; rather, it is the background against which other trends appear with greater intensity. However, in our opinion, the choice of this particular style is stylistically relevant, so we will consider it in detail.

The colloquial literary style to which this passage belongs was chosen by the author, in our opinion, in order to bring Jerry’s speech closer to reality, to show his excitement when delivering the speech, and also to emphasize its dialogical nature, and therefore Jerry’s attempt to “talk.” present”, to establish a relationship with a person. The text uses numerous markers of conversational style, which can be attributed to two interdependent and at the same time contradictory trends - the tendency towards redundancy and the tendency towards compression. The first is expressed by the presence of such “weedy” words as “I think I told you”, “yes”, “what I mean is”, “you know”, “sort of”, “well”. These words create the feeling that speech is characterized by uneven speed of pronunciation: Jerry seems to slow down his speech a little at these words, perhaps to emphasize the following words (as, for example, in the case of “what I mean is”) or trying to gather your thoughts. In addition, they, along with such colloquial expressions as “half-assed”, “kicked free”, “that was that” or “bolted upstairs”, add spontaneity, spontaneity and, of course, emotionality to Jerry’s monologue.

The tendency toward compression characteristic of the colloquial style manifests itself in various ways at the phonetic, lexical and syntactic levels of the language. The use of a truncated form, that is, reduction of auxiliary verbs, for example “it”s”, “there”s”, “don”t”, “wasn”t” and others, is a characteristic feature of colloquial speech and once again emphasizes Jerry’s informal tone. From a lexical point of view, the phenomenon of compression can be examined using the example of the use of such phrasal verbs as “go for”, “got away”, “went on”, “pack up”, “tore into”, “got back”, “threw away”, "thought about it up". They create an informal communication environment, revealing the closeness expressed in language between the participants in communication, contrasting with the lack of internal closeness between them. It seems to us that in this way Jerry seeks to create conditions for a frank conversation, for confession, for which formality and neutral coldness are unacceptable, since we are talking about the most important, the most intimate for the hero.

At the syntactic level, compression finds expression in elliptical constructions. For example, in the text we encounter sentences such as “Like this: Grrrrrrr!” "Like so!" “Cosy.”, which have great emotional potential, which, realized together with other stylistic means, conveys Jerry’s excitement, abruptness and sensual fullness of his speech.

Before moving on to a step-by-step analysis of the text, we note, based on the data of quantitative analysis, the presence of some leading trends inherent in the monologue of the main character. These include: repetition of elements at the phonetic (alliteration), lexical (lexical repetition) and syntactic (parallelism) levels, increased emotionality, expressed primarily by aposiopesis, as well as rhythmicity, not reflected in the table, but largely inherent in the text under consideration . We will refer to these three nuclear trends throughout the analysis.

So, let's turn to a detailed analysis of the text. From the very beginning of Jerry's story, the reader is prepared for something significant, since Jerry himself considers it necessary to title his story, thereby separating it from the entire conversation into a separate story. According to the author's remark, he pronounces this title as if reading the inscription on a billboard - "THE STORY OF JERRY AND THE DOG!" The graphic organization of this phrase, namely its design in capital letters only and an exclamation mark at the end, somewhat clarifies the remark - each word is pronounced loudly, clearly, solemnly, prominently. It seems to us that this solemnity takes on a tinge of ironic pathos, since the sublime form does not coincide with the mundane content. On the other hand, the title itself looks more like the title of a fairy tale, which correlates with Jerry's address to Peter at a certain moment as a child who can't wait to find out what happened at the zoo: "JERRY: because after I tell you about the dog, do you know what then? Then. then I"ll tell you about what happened at the zoo."

Despite the fact that, as we noted, this text belongs to a conversational style, which is characterized by simplicity of syntactic structures, already the first sentence is a very confusing set of words: “What I am going to tell you has something to do with how sometimes it "s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly; or, maybe I only think that it has something to do with that." The presence of words such as “something”, “sometimes”, “maybe” gives the phrase a shade of uncertainty, vagueness, and abstractness. The hero seems to be responding with this sentence to his thoughts that were not expressed, which can explain the beginning of the next sentence with the emphatic conjunction “but”, which interrupts his reasoning, returning directly to the story. It should be noted that this sentence contains two parallel constructions, the first of which is “has something to do.” with" frames the second "to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly". The first construction is a repetition at both the syntactic and lexical, and therefore at the phonetic levels. Its identity reverses the reader’s attention to the preceding elements of the phrase, namely “what I am going to tell you” and “maybe I only think that it”, and encourages us to compare them. When comparing these elements, we observe Jerry’s loss of confidence that he understood correctly. meaning of what happened to him, doubt is heard in his voice, which he tries to suppress by starting a new thought. The conscious interruption of reflection is clearly felt in the initial “but” of the next sentence.

Other parallel constructions of the second sentence can be summarized by the following model "go / come back (verbs, both expressing movement, but in a different direction) + a + long / short (antonymous definitions) + distance + out of way / correctly (adverbs of manner, which are contextual antonyms)". As we see, these two identically constructed phrases are contrasted in their lexical meaning, which creates a stylistic effect: the reader thinks about the statement made, looking for the implied meaning in it. We don’t yet know what will be discussed next, but we can guess that this expression may be two-dimensional, because the word “distance” can mean both the real distance between objects of reality (for example, to the zoo) and a segment of life’s path. Thus, although we do not understand what exactly Jerry meant, we, based on the syntactic and lexical emphasis, feel the parting tone of the phrase and can assert the undoubted importance of this thought for Jerry himself. The second sentence, mainly due to its similarity in tone and construction with folk wisdom or a saying, can be perceived as the subtitle of a story about a dog, revealing its main idea.

Already in the example of this sentence, we can observe the creation of rhythm using a complex system of lexical and syntactic repetitions. The rhythm of Jerry's entire monologue, based on various types repetition and alternation of tension and relaxation of his speech gives the text emotional appeal, literally hypnotizing the reader. In this case, rhythm is also a means of creating integrity and coherence of the text.

Using the following sentence as an example, it is interesting to consider the stylistic function of using ellipses, since they will appear more than once in the text. Jerry says that he walked north, then - a pause (ellipsis), and he corrects himself - in a northern direction, again a pause (ellipsis): "I walked north. northerly, rather. until I came here." In our opinion, in this context, ellipsis is a graphic way of expressing aposiopesis. We can imagine that Jerry sometimes stops and collects his thoughts, trying to remember exactly how he walked, as if much depends on it; In addition, he is, in all likelihood, in a state of strong emotional upsurge, excitement, like a person telling something extremely important to him, and therefore often gets confused, unable to speak from excitement.

In this sentence, in addition to aposiopesis, one can also identify partial lexical repetition (“north ... northerly”), parallel constructions (“it”s why I went to the zoo today, and why I walked north”) and two cases of alliteration (repetition of the consonant sound [t] and the long vowel [o:]). connected by the conjunction “and”. It seems to us that such instrumentation of the statement creates a certain contrast between the speed and inflexibility of Jerry’s decision to go to the zoo (sound [t]) and the length of his road in the north direction (sounds [o:] and [n]), emphasized by partial lexical repetition. Thanks to the convergence of the listed stylistic devices and figures, their mutual clarification, the following picture is created: as a result of thinking about the situation that Jerry is going to talk about, he decides to go to the zoo, and this decision is characterized by spontaneity and some abruptness, and then wanders slowly in a northerly direction, perhaps hoping to meet someone.

With the words “All right”, which have a functional and stylistic connotation that relates them to colloquial speech, the author begins the creation of one of the key images of the play - the image of a dog. Let's look at it in detail. The first characteristic that Jerry gives to the dog is expressed by the inverted epithet “a black monster of a beast”, where the denoted is “beast”, that is, the dog denoting “black monster”, the basis of comparison, in our opinion, is the formidable, possibly sinister looking animal with black fur. It should be noted that the word beast has a bookish connotation and, according to the Longman Exams Coach dictionary, contains the semes “big” and “dangerous” (“an animal, especially a large or dangerous one”), which, undoubtedly, together with the expressiveness of the word “monster” , adds expressiveness to the designated epithet.

Then, after a general definition, the author reveals the image of a black monster, clarifies it with expressive details: “an oversized head, tiny, tiny ears, and eyes. bloodshot, infected, maybe; and a body you can see the ribs through the skin.” Placed after a colon, these nouns can be interpreted as a series of homogeneous direct objects, but due to the lack of a verb to which they could refer (suppose the beginning might be "he had an oversized head..."), they are perceived as a series name sentences. This creates a visual effect, increases the expressiveness and emotionality of the phrase, and also plays a significant role in creating a rhythmic pattern. The double use of the conjunction “and” allows us to speak of polysyndeton, which smoothes out the completeness of the enumeration, making a series of homogeneous members seem open, and at the same time fixes attention on each of the elements of this series. Thus, it seems that the dog is not fully described; there is still a lot that would be worth talking about in order to complete the picture of the terrible black monster. Thanks to polysyndeton and the absence of a generalizing verb, a strong position is created for the elements of enumeration, psychologically especially noticeable for the reader, which is also strengthened by the presence of alliteration, represented by a repeating sound in the words oversized, tiny, eyes.

Let us consider the four elements identified in this way, each of which is specified by a definition. The head is described using the epithet "oversized", in which the prefix "over-" means "over-", that is, it gives the impression of a disproportionately large head, contrasting with the tiny ears described by the repeated epithet "tiny". The word “tiny” itself means something very small and is translated into Russian as “miniature, tiny”, but reinforced by repetition, it makes the dog’s ears unusually, fabulously small, which strengthens the already sharp contrast with a huge head, framed by antithesis.

The eyes are described as “bloodshot, infected”, and it should be noted that both of these epithets are in postposition to the word being defined after the aposiopesis marked with an ellipsis, which enhances their expressiveness. "Bloodshot", that is, filled with blood, implies red, one of the dominant colors, as we will see later, in the description of the animal, thus, it seems to us, the effect of its similarity with the hellish dog Cerberus, guarding the gates of hell, is achieved. In addition, although Jerry clarifies that perhaps the cause is an infection, bloodshot eyes are still associated with anger, malice, and to some extent, madness.

The convergence of stylistic devices in this short segment of text allows us to create an image of a crazy, aggressive dog, the absurdity and absurdity of which, expressed by the antithesis, immediately catches the eye.

I would like to once again draw attention to how masterfully Albee creates a tangible rhythm in his prose. At the end of the sentence in question, the dog’s body is described using the attributive clause “you can see the ribs through the skin,” which is not connected to the attributive word “body” by a conjunction or allied word, thus the rhythm specified at the beginning of the sentence is not violated.

The black-red palette when describing the dog is emphasized by the author with the help of lexical repetitions and alliteration in the following sentence: “The dog is black, all black; all black except for the bloodshot eyes, and. yes. and an open sore on its. right forepaw; that is red, too." The sentence is divided into two parts not only by ellipses expressing aposiopesis, but also by various alliterations: in the first case, these are repeated consonant sounds, in the second, a vowel sound. The first part repeats what the reader already knew, but with greater expressiveness created by the lexical repetition of the word “black”. In the second, after some pause and a double “and”, creating tension in the statement, a new detail is introduced, which, thanks to the reader’s preparation by the previous phrase, is perceived very brightly - a red wound on the right paw.

It should be noted that here we are again faced with an analogue of a nominal sentence, that is, the existence of this wound is stated, but there is no indication of its connection with the dog, it exists, as it were, separately. Creating the same effect is achieved in the phrase “there’s a grey-yellow-white color, too, when he bares his fangs.” The very syntactic construction like “there is / there are” implies the existence of an object / phenomenon in some area of ​​space or time, color “exists” here, which makes this color something separate, independent of its wearer. Such “separateness” of details does not interfere with the perception of the dog as a holistic image, but gives it greater prominence and expressiveness.

The epithet “grey-yellow-white” defines the color as blurry, unclear in comparison with the bright saturation of the previous ones (black, red). It is interesting to note that this epithet, despite its complexity, sounds like one word and is pronounced in one breath, thus describing the color not as a combination of several shades, but as one specific, understandable to every reader, color of the animal’s fangs, covered with a yellowish coating. This is achieved, in our opinion, by smooth phonetic transitions from stem to stem: the stem gray ends with the sound [j], from which the next one begins, yellow, the final diphthong of which practically merges with the subsequent [w] in the word white.

Jerry is very excited when telling this story, which is expressed in the confusion and increasing emotionality of his speech. The author shows this through the extensive use of aposiopesis, the use of colloquial inclusions with interjection, such as “oh, yes,” emphatic conjunctions “and” at the beginning of sentences, as well as onomatopoeia, formed into the exclamatory sentence “Grrrrrrrr!”

Albee practically does not use metaphors in the monologue of his main character; in the analyzed passage we encountered only two cases, one of which is an example of an erased linguistic metaphor (“trouser leg”), and the second (“monster”) refers to the creation of the image of a dog and in to some extent repeats the already mentioned inverted epithet (“monster of the beast”). The use of the same word “monster” is a means of maintaining the internal integrity of the text, as, in general, is any repetition accessible to the reader’s perception. However, its contextual meaning is somewhat different: in an epithet, due to combination with the word beast, it takes on the meaning of something negative, frightening, while in a metaphor, when combined with the epithet “poor”, the absurdity, incongruity and sick state of the animal comes to the fore , this image is also supported by the explanatory epithets “old” and “misused”. Jerry is confident that the dog's current condition is the result of people's bad attitude towards him, and not manifestations of his character, that, in essence, the dog is not to blame for the fact that he is so scary and pathetic (the word "misused" can be translated literally as " incorrectly used", this is the second participle, which means it has a passive meaning). This confidence is expressed by the adverb “certainly”, as well as the emphatic auxiliary verb “do” before the word “believe”, which violates the usual pattern of constructing an affirmative sentence, thereby making it unusual for the reader, and therefore more expressive.

It is curious that a significant part of the pauses occur precisely in that part of the story where Jerry describes the dog - 8 out of 17 cases of the use of aposiopesis came across us in this relatively small segment of the text. Perhaps this is explained by the fact that, starting his confession, the main character is very excited, first of all, by his decision to express everything, so his speech is confusing and a little illogical, and only then, gradually, this excitement smoothes out. One can also assume that the very memory of this dog, which once meant so much for Jerry’s worldview, excites him, which is reflected directly in his speech.

Thus, the key image of the dog is created by the author using “colored” language frames, each of which reflects one of its features. The mixture of black, red and gray-yellow-white is associated with a mixture of menacing, incomprehensible (black), aggressive, furious, hellish, sick (red) and old, spoiled, “misused” (gray-yellow-white). A very emotional, confusing description of the dog is created with the help of pauses, emphatic conjunctions, nominative constructions, as well as all kinds of repetitions.

If at the beginning of the story the dog seemed to us to be a black monster with red, inflamed eyes, then gradually he begins to acquire almost human features: it is not for nothing that Jerry uses the pronoun “he” in relation to him, not “it”, and at the end of the analyzed text to mean “muzzle” " uses the word "face" ("He turned his face back to the hamburgers"). Thus, the line between animals and humans is erased, they are placed on the same level, which is supported by the character’s phrase “animals are indifferent to me... like people.” The case of aposiopesis presented here is caused, in our opinion, not by excitement, but by the desire to emphasize this sad fact of the similarity of people and animals, their internal distance from all living beings, which leads us to the problem of alienation in general.

The phrase “like Saint Francis had birds hanging off him all the time” is highlighted by us as a historical allusion, but it can be considered both as a comparison and as irony, since here Jerry contrasts himself with Francis of Assisi, one of the most revered Catholic saints, but uses for him descriptions of the colloquial verb “hang off” and the exaggerated “all the time”, that is, it detracts from the serious content with a frivolous form of expression, which creates a somewhat ironic effect. The allusion enhances the expressiveness of the conveyed idea of ​​Jerry’s alienation, and also performs a characterological function, describing the main character as a fairly educated person.

From the generalization, Jerry returns to his story again, and again, as in the third sentence, as if interrupting his thoughts out loud, he uses the emphatic conjunction “but”, after which he begins to talk about the dog. The following is a description of how the interaction between the dog and the main character took place. It is necessary to note the dynamism and rhythm of this description, created with the help of lexical repetitions (such as “stumbly dog ​​... stumbly run”, as well as the verb “got” repeated four times), alliteration (the sound [g] in the phrase “go for me, to get one of my legs") and a parallel construction ("He got a piece of my trouser leg... he got that..."). The predominance of voiced consonants (101 out of 156 consonants in the segment “From the very beginning ... so that was that”) also creates a feeling of dynamics and liveliness of the narrative.

There is a curious play on words with the lexeme “leg”: the dog intended “to get one of my legs”, but the result was that he “got a piece of my trouser leg”. As you can see, the constructions are almost identical, which creates the feeling that the dog has finally achieved his goal, but the word “leg” is used in the second case in the metaphorical sense of “trouser leg,” which is clarified by the subsequent verb “mended.” Thus, on the one hand, the coherence of the text is achieved, and on the other hand, the smoothness and consistency of perception is disrupted, to some extent irritating the reader or viewer.

Trying to describe the way the dog moved when it pounced on him, Jerry goes through several epithets, trying to find the right one: “Not like he was rabid, you know; he was sort of a stumbly dog, but he wasn’t half-assed, either. It was a good, stumbly run...” As we see, the hero is trying to find something in between “rabid” and “half-assed”, so he introduces the neologism “stumbly”, implying, in all likelihood, a slightly stumbling, uncertain gait or run (conclusion that the word “stumbly” is an author’s neologism was made by us on the basis of its absence in the dictionary Longman Exams Coach, UK, 2006). gaits to the entire object. The repetition of this epithet with different nouns within two closely spaced sentences is, in our opinion, the purpose of clarifying its meaning, making the use of the newly introduced word transparent, and also focusing the reader’s attention on it, since it is important for characterizing the dog, him. disproportionality, absurdity.

The phrase "Cosy. So." we defined it as an ellipsis, since in this case the omission of the main members of the sentence seems undoubted. However, it should be noted that it cannot be supplemented from the surrounding context or based on linguistic experience. Such fragmentary impressions of the main character, not related to the context, once again emphasize the confusion of his speech, and, in addition, confirm our idea that he sometimes seems to be responding to his thoughts, hidden from the reader.

olby monologue stylistic device

The following sentence is an example of double alliteration, created by the repetition of two consonant sounds [w] and [v] in one segment of speech. Since these sounds are different in both quality and place of articulation, but sound similar, the sentence is a bit like a tongue twister or saying, in which the deep meaning is framed in an easy-to-remember, attention-grabbing form. Particularly noticeable is the pair “whenever” - “never when”, both elements of which consist of almost identical sounds, arranged in different sequences. It seems to us that this phonetically confusing phrase, which has a slightly ironic overtone, serves to express the confusion and confusion, chaoticity and absurdity of the situation that developed between Jerry and the dog. She sets up the next statement, “That’s funny,” but Jerry immediately corrects himself: “Or, it was funny.” Thanks to this lexical repetition, framed in equivalent syntactic constructions with different tenses of the verb “to be,” the tragedy of that very thing becomes obvious to the reader. a situation that once could have been laughed at before. The expressiveness of this expression is based on a sharp transition from a light, frivolous to a serious perception of what happened. It seems that a lot of time has passed since then, a lot has changed, including Jerry’s attitude to life. .

The sentence “I decided: First, I”ll kill the dog with kindness, and if that doesn’t work. I”ll just kill him.”, expressing the main character’s train of thought, requires special consideration. As we can see, thanks to the convergence of stylistic devices, such as lexical repetition, oxymoron (“kill with kindness”), parallel constructions, aposiopesis, as well as phonetic similarity of expressions, this sentence becomes stylistically striking, thereby drawing the reader’s attention to its semantic content. It should be noted that the word “kill” is repeated. twice in approximately similar syntactic positions, but with a semantic variation: in the first case we are dealing with the figurative meaning of this verb, which can be expressed in Russian “to amaze, delight”, and in the second - with its direct meaning “to deprive of life”. Having reached the second “kill”, the reader automatically in the first split second perceives it in the same softened figurative meaning as the previous one, therefore, when he realizes the true meaning of this word, the effect of the direct meaning is intensified many times over, it shocks both Peter and the audience or readers. In addition, the aposiopesis that precedes the second “kill” emphasizes the words that follow it, further exacerbating their impact.

Rhythm, as a means of organizing the text, allows us to achieve its integrity and better perception by the reader. A clear rhythmic pattern can be seen, for example, in the following sentence: “So, the next day I went out and bought a bag of hamburgers, medium rare, no catsup, no onion.” It is obvious that here the rhythm is created through the use of alliteration (sounds [b] and [g]), syntactic repetition, as well as the general brevity of the construction of subordinate clauses (meaning the absence of conjunctions, it could be like this: “which are of medium rare” or "in which there"s no catsup."). Rhythm allows you to more vividly convey the dynamics of the described actions.

We have already looked at repetition as a means of creating rhythm and maintaining the integrity of the text, but the functions of repetition are not limited to this. For example, in the phrase "When I got back to the rooming-house the dog was waiting for me. I half opened the door that led into the entrance hall, and there he was; waiting for me." the repetition of the element “waiting for me” gives the reader a feeling of building anticipation, as if the dog had been waiting for the main character for a long time. In addition, one feels the inevitability of the meeting, the tension of the situation.

The last point I would like to highlight is the description of the actions of the dog to whom Jerry offers hamburger meat. To create dynamics, the author uses lexical repetitions (“snarled”, “then faster”), alliteration of the sound [s], combining all actions into one uninterrupted chain, as well as syntactic organization - rows of homogeneous predicates connected by a non-union connection. It’s interesting to see what verbs Jerry uses to describe the dog’s reaction: “snarled”, “stopped snarling”, “sniffed”, “moved slowly”, “looked at me”, “turned his face”, “smelled”, “sniffed”, "tore into". As we can see, the most expressive of the presented phrasal verbs “tore into”, standing after the onomatopoeia and highlighted by a pause preceding it, completes the description, most likely characterizing the wild nature of the dog. Due to the fact that the previous verbs, with the exception of “looked at me,” contain a fricative [s], they are combined in our minds as preparation verbs and thus express the dog’s caution, perhaps his distrust of the stranger, but at the same time we feel a burning desire in him to eat the meat offered to him as quickly as possible, which is expressed by the repeated impatient “then faster.” Thus, judging by the design of the last sentences of our analysis, we can come to the conclusion that, despite his hunger and his “wildness,” the dog is still very wary of the treat offered by a stranger. That is, no matter how strange it may seem, he is afraid. This fact is significant from the point of view that alienation between living beings can be maintained by fear. According to the text, we can say that Jerry and the dog are afraid of each other, so understanding between them is impossible.

So, since repeating meanings and stylistic means turn out to be the most important stylistically, based on the analysis we can conclude that the main trends used by Edward Albee to organize the monologue speech of the main character are all kinds of repetitions at different linguistic levels, the rhythm of speech with its alternation of tense moments and relaxations, emotionally charged pauses and a system of interconnected epithets.

Edward Albee

What happened at the zoo

Play in one act

CHARACTERS

Peter

about forty years old, neither fat nor thin, neither handsome nor ugly. He wears a tweed suit and horn-rimmed glasses. Smoking a pipe. And although he is, so to speak, already entering middle age, his clothing style and demeanor are almost youthful.

Jerry

about forty years old, dressed not so much poorly as sloppily. The once toned, muscular figure begins to grow fat. Now he cannot be called beautiful, but traces of his former attractiveness are still visible quite clearly. The heavy gait and sluggish movements are not explained by promiscuity; If you look closely, you can see that this man is immensely tired.

Central Park in New York; summer sunday. Two garden benches on both sides of the stage, behind them are bushes, trees, the sky. Peter is sitting on the right bench. He is reading a book. He puts the book on his lap, wipes his glasses and goes back to reading. Jerry enters.

Jerry. I was now at the zoo.

Peter doesn't pay attention to him.

I say, I was just at the zoo. MISTER, I WAS AT THE ZOO!

Peter. Eh?.. What?.. Excuse me, are you telling me?..

Jerry. I was at the zoo, then I walked until I ended up here. Tell me, did I go north?

Peter (puzzled). To the north?.. Yes... Probably. Let me figure it out.

Jerry (points a finger into the audience). Is this Fifth Avenue?

Peter. This? Yes of course.

Jerry. What kind of street is this that crosses it? That one on the right?

Peter. The one over there? Oh, this is the Seventy-four.

Jerry. And the zoo is near Sixty-fifth, which means I was going north.

Peter (he can't wait to get back to reading). Yes, apparently so.

Jerry. Good old north.

Peter (almost mechanically). Haha.

Jerry (after a pause). But not directly north.

Peter. I... Well, yes, not directly north. So to speak, in a northern direction.

Jerry (watches as Peter, trying to get rid of him, fills his pipe). Do you want to give yourself lung cancer?

Peter (not without irritation he glances at him, but then smiles). No sir. You won't make any money from this.

Jerry. That's right, sir. Most likely, you will get cancer in your mouth and you will have to insert something like Freud had after he had half his jaw removed. What are they called, these things?

Peter (reluctantly). Prosthesis?

Jerry. Exactly! Prosthesis. You are an educated person, aren't you? Are you by any chance a doctor?

Peter. No, I just read about it somewhere. I think it was in Time magazine. (Takes up the book.)

Jerry. In my opinion, Time magazine is not for idiots.

Peter. I think so too.

Jerry (after a pause). It's very good that Fifth Avenue is there.

Peter (absently). Yes.

Jerry. I can't stand the western part of the park.

Peter. Yes? (Carefully, but with a glimmer of interest.) Why?

Jerry (casually). I don't know myself.

Peter. A! (He buried himself in the book again.)

Jerry (looks at Peter silently until Peter, embarrassed, looks up at him). Maybe we should talk? Or don't you want to?

Peter (with obvious reluctance). No... why not?

Jerry. I see you don't want to.

Peter (puts down the book, takes the pipe out of his mouth. Smiling). No, really, it’s my pleasure.

Jerry. It's not worth it if you don't want to.

Peter (finally decisively). Not at all, I'm very happy.

Jerry. What's his name... Today is a nice day.

Peter (looking up at the sky unnecessarily). Yes. Very nice. Wonderful.

Jerry. And I was at the zoo.

Peter. Yes, I think you already said... didn't you?

Jerry. Tomorrow you will read about it in the newspapers, if you don’t see it on TV in the evening. You probably have a TV?

Peter. Even two - one for children.

Jerry. Are you married?

Peter (with dignity). Of course!

Jerry. Nowhere, thank God, does it say that this is mandatory.

Peter. Yes... that's of course...

Jerry. So you have a wife.

Peter (not knowing how to continue this conversation). Well, yes!

Jerry. And you have children!

Peter. Yes. Two.

Jerry. Boys?

Peter. No, girls... both are girls.

Jerry. But you wanted boys.

Peter. Well... naturally, every person wants to have a son, but...

Jerry (a little mockingly). But that's how dreams are crushed, right?

Peter (with irritation). That's not what I wanted to say at all!

Jerry. And you're not going to have any more children?

Peter (absently). No. No more. (When I woke up, I would be annoyed.) How did you find out?

Jerry. Maybe it’s the way you cross your legs, or something in your voice. Or maybe he guessed it by accident. The wife doesn't want it, right?

Peter (furiously). None of your business!

Pause.

Jerry nods. Peter calms down.

Well, that's true. We won't have any more children.

Jerry (soft). This is how dreams fall apart.

Peter (forgiving him for this). Yes... perhaps you're right.

Jerry. Well... What else?

Peter. What were you saying about the zoo... what will I read or see about it?..

Jerry. I'll tell you later. Aren't you angry that I'm asking you questions?

Peter. Oh, not at all.

Jerry. Do you know why I pester you? I rarely have to talk to people, unless you say: give me a glass of beer, or: where is the restroom, or: when does the show start, or: don’t give free rein to your hands, buddy, and so on. In general, you know it yourself.

Peter. Honestly, I don't know.

Jerry. But sometimes you want to talk to a person - to really talk; I want to know everything about him...

Peter (laughs, still feeling awkward). And today your guinea pig is me?

Jerry. On such a thoroughly sunny Sunday afternoon, there is nothing better than talking to a decent married man who has two daughters and... uh... a dog?

Peter shakes his head.

No? Two dogs?

Peter shakes his head.

Hm. No dogs at all?

Peter shakes his head sadly.

Well, that's strange! As far as I understand, you must love animals. Cat?

Peter nods sadly.

Cats! But it can’t be that you did it of your own free will... Wife and daughters?

Peter nods.

Curious, do you have anything else?

Peter (he has to clear his throat). There are... there are two more parrots. ... um ... each daughter has one.

Jerry. Birds.

Peter. They live in a cage in my girls' room.

Jerry. Are they sick with something?.. Birds, that is.

Peter. Don't think.

Jerry. It's a pity. Otherwise, you could let them out of the cage, the cats would eat them and then, perhaps, die.

Peter looks at him confused, then laughs.

Well, what else? What are you doing to feed all this crowd?

Peter. I... uh... I work at... at a small publishing house. We... uh... we publish textbooks.

Jerry. Well, that's very nice. Very nice. How much do you earn?

Peter (still fun). Well, listen!

Jerry. Come on. Speak.

Peter. Well, I make fifteen hundred a month, but I never carry more than forty dollars... so... if you... if you're a bandit... ha ha ha!

Jerry (ignoring his words). Where do you live?

Peter hesitates.

Oh, look, I'm not going to rob you and I'm not going to kidnap your parrots, your cats and your daughters.

Peter (too loud). I live between Lexington Avenue and Third Avenue, on Seventy-fourth Street.

Jerry. Well, you see, it wasn't that hard to say.