English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

In Chigozie Obioma’s novel, The Fishermen (2015), we witness the tragic events triggered by a prophecy delivered to four Nigerian brothers. My main aim in this essay is, following J. Hillis Miller’s analysis of speech acts in literature, and also ideas by Jacques Derrida and Derek Attridge, to develop an argument about this prophecy as a performative use of words that makes things happen in the world by way of its listeners and believers. The prophecy is presented as a speech act characterised by secrecy, obscurity and ambiguity, given the impossibility of subjecting its words to true and false verification and its undecidability in relation to the literal and the figurative uses of language. It is a speech act that requires an addressee that literally and naively believes in it, with Ikenna–the oldest brother–emerging as such a believer, who in this sense is just like his siblings, repeatedly presented as taking language at face value, unable to recognize its duplicitous and ambivalent nature. Because of this inability to perceive the parabolic or indirect dimension of language, the children establish a continuity between language and action, which leads them to act on reality led by words, in all cases with fatal consequences.

The ‘Deadly Secret’ of the Prophecy: Performative and Parabolic Language in Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen