Deception in Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker: Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The present study explores the theme of deception in Harold Pinter’s play the Caretaker from linguistic perspectives. It focuses on the forms of verbal deception revealed in the characters’ discourse by applying Grice’s theory of Conversational Implicature (CI), mainly his four Maxims of conversation: quality, quantity, relation, and manner. The analyzed data are selected from the characters’ dialogues in which the forms of deception are apparently revealed through the violation of the maxims. The results of the study indicate that the characters in the Caretaker are violating all maxims, and all forms of deception are revealed through the violation of one or more than one maxim; however, fabrication is the most apparent form of verbal deception in The Caretaker; thereby, the quality maxim is the most violated maxim.