THE ROLES OF LANGUAGE IN SELECTED NOVELS OF THOMAS BERGER (PHILOSOPHY (OF LANGUAGE), SEMIOTICS, WITTGENSTEIN, QUINE, POSTMODERNISM)

The fiction of contemporary American novelist Thomas Berger demonstrates the ways language may alter--or define--reality. This study investigates some of the roles language plays in selected novels. In Neighbors (1980), language acts as an antagonist, defeating the protagonist of the book, Earl Keese. In the pseudo-detective novel Who Is Teddy Villanova? (1977), language incarcerates the protagonist, leaving him in a verbal and ontological limbo. A deluded survival of the battles with language is shown in Reinhart's Women (1981); an unburdened, existentialist survival is demonstrated in Little Big Man (1964). In Killing Time (1967), Berger explores the intriguing possibilities of freedom from language. The two most recent works in the Berger canon, The Feud (1983) and Nowhere (1985), suggest that Berger has moved toward a fulfillment of a dream of Flaubert: to write about nothing, to write books held together entirely by the force of their style. In these works, language supersedes all other variables and becomes the primary "actor.".;Berger's use of language in various roles suggests strong parallels with ideas expressed by semioticists and philosophers of language. This study demonstrates some of those parallels, focusing especially on the philosophical views of Ludwig Wittgenstein and W. V. Quine.