Journal archive

Abstract: The present article deals with nonverbal means of communication as the main elements of J. D. Salinger’s poetics of silence. A gesture and a pause are particularly important types of nonverbal expression in Salinger’s artistic world. Moreover, in most cases they are used together. Salinger widens the meaning of a pause in his texts: addition to its primary meaning as temporary break in speech, a pause should be read as the break of any movements and gestures at the same time. Only under these circumstances Salinger’s characters show their genuine and deep attention to the subject of the conversation. A pause as a communicatively significant element of Salinger’s dialog fragments is the subject of this paper. The material of the research is Salinger’s novel «The Catcher in the Rye». The article comes to the conclusion that a pause in the designated novel is used as an original artistic method to denote the areas of informative silence. The presence or absence of a pause in Salinger’s dialogs equally bears some meaning, forms the subtext of the novel and determines the character system. A pause in the novel «The Catcher in the Rye» is a nonverbal equivalent of hidden soulful impulses and experiences of the characters. Its main function is to expose the internal intentions of communicants and to reveal the genuineness or imaginary nature of their interest in the dialog and the interlocutor.