A RELEVANCE THEORETICAL ANALYSIS OF FICTIONAL NARRATIVES IN CHINUA ACHEBE'S NO LONGER AT EASE.

The major drive of human communication is the recognition of intention. This is one of the major contributions of Paul Grice to the development of pragmatics. However, studies in Relevance Theory have elaborated this claim to incorporate the internal psycho-cognitive mechanisms associated with Grice's claim. Sperber and Wilson in many of their publications espoused the course of investigating the natural proceedings of human language and assert that the core principle of communication is relevance. This theoretic framework is based on the network of the principles of cognition, communication, and comprehension. In this paper, it is discovered that relevance is not just a property of spoken language but also of written aspect of language. Since the intention of every writer is to communicate to an audience, and to communicate means to be understood, this paper examines how the property of relevance is construed in fictional narrative and how, by means of invented conversation between and among fictional characters, the authorial intention is made perceptible to the reader. The theory is applied to Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease, drawing analysis from selected conversations in the novel. It is realised that the conclusive maximization of relevance from the novel, on the part of the reader, is dependent on the explication of the cognitive transaction of relevance among the characters. This explication is made possible by means of authorial mediacy in the construction of context upon which the reader anchors his cognitive hypothesis toward the comprehension of the narrative conversations. In general, it is discovered that the interconnection of spectra of narratives as the design of the narrator is only relevant to the reader if the blending of those separate events toward the holistic understanding of the novel yields a positive cognitive effect. On the other hand the major goal of a writer of fiction is to reproduce a natural conversational prototype based on relevance, with the intention that readers will be effortlessly guided toward his authorial intention in order to draw conclusions that matter to them. The analysis from the novel therefore, provides details of how the reader processes and comprehends the conversation between characters and the novel as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]