A Pragmatic approach to the mind style of schizophrenia in Fight Club
Abstract
This article examines the construction of a fictional character’s mind style associated with schizophrenia in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) from a cognitive stylistic and pragmatic perspective. It addresses the underexplored role of pragmatic cues in shaping how readers infer and update mental representations of characters based on linguistic evidence. Adopting a qualitative methodology, the study analyses selected passages of the narrator’s discourse through the framework of Grice’s (1975) conversational maxims, focusing on instances of non-observance in both narrative and dialogic contexts. The findings demonstrate that recurrent pragmatic deviations—such as disorganised speech, repetitive structures, topic shifts, and conversational silences—systematically project a distinctive and unconventional mind style. These linguistic patterns function cumulatively as foreshadowing devices, enabling readers to infer the narrator’s cognitive condition prior to its explicit revelation in the narrative. This study contributes to cognitive stylistics by foregrounding the analytical value of Gricean pragmatics in the construction of fictional minds. It further expands the methodological toolkit for mind style research, showing how pragmatic features illuminate the representation of cognitively atypical minds in literary texts.
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