Ellipsis and aposiopesis: reflexivity of silence in Samuel Beckett’s drama

Abstract

The following work addresses the function of silence in Samuel Beckett’s drama as a resource for discursive densification. Thus, it establishes the functions that silence adopts as a counterpoint and disjunction, as in close correlation to dialogue and as an expression of the unprofessed and also, the new meaning and function that contemporary drama acquires. Hence, in eyes of the structured and sequential nature that the dramatic discourse should have as an action prompter, we define the connotational function of silence and pauses as an strategy to densify discourse in Beckett’s textuality. Doing so allows to disclose how the supposedly “absence of sense” in a discourse that is constantly interrupted and suspended, transforms itself into a signifying condition by convoluting itself up reflexively into language and not as a denial of it.