To tell and to remain silent in the Epilogue of La ciudad y los perros by Mario Vargas Llosa. A Textual Pragmatics approach

Abstract

By using the focus of pragmatics as the starting point, this paper deals with the Epilogue of the novel La ciudad y los perros. I intended to highlight the ways in which communicative interaction between characters reflect the verbalization of a series of norms regarding power relations in the frame of military discipline. The study is divided in two parts: the first one recovers the theory of metaphors by Johnson and Lakoff; the second one deals with the theory of speech acts and the cooperative principle and conversational maxims of Grice are observed.