Personaggi letterari che tacciono: motivazioni ed efficacia di un espediente narrativo

This is a study of literary silent characters, in modern and contemporary Western literature. The selected texts are 61 (including novels, short stories and tales), by 43 different authors, from 18 countries mainly in Europe, but also in the US and South America, with some examples from other nations such as Turkey, South Africa, Japan. Standing out from the many essays dealing with the theme of silence or narrative omissions made by the authors, this research focuses totally on silent characters, analyzed in terms of narrative, psychological and relational. The theoretical tools used were therefore those of narratology and literary criticism, including stylistic analysis. To better understand the individual characters, treated almost like real people, we turned also to psychological studies and to the pragmatics of communication. The objective was to compare different ways to keep quiet, classified according to their motivations, distinguishing especially the plans of fiction (that is, the effects that silence produces within the stories) and reality (ie the author’s aims towards readers in portraying a silent character). Keeping in mind these two aspects, the study has also attempted an evaluation of the effectiveness of silence, instrument so suggestive as dangerously ambiguous, from the narrative point of view and in relation to the communication of author’s messages for the reader.