“All those words”: Speech as a marker of human boundaries in William Gass’s novel “Omensetter’s Luck”

Abstract

   The article examines philosophical problems in William Gass’s novel “Omensetter’s Luck” that manifest themselves both in the character creation and in the ideological and conceptual design of the artistic whole. For William Gass as a writer, who was formed under the influence of Wittgenstein’s ideas, linguistic reality is the only reality accessible to human perception. Omensetter, the character in the novel, not endowed by the author with fully developed speech skills, comes to be regarded as a being who has not yet acquired a human essence, a material fact that the people around him should interpret at their discretion. On the other hand, attempts of the “speaking” characters to overcome language, to go beyond the boundaries of language into the realm of silence are also regarded by the author as the destruction of human nature, which is demonstrated by characters like Henry Pimber and Jethro Ferber in the climactic moments of the novel. As a result, the human essence inevitably becomes delineated by the boundaries of the verbal. At the same time, the latter can be constructed in various ways, having both destructive and creative consequences, the two perspectives being demonstrated in the novel by the examples of three narrators and their different verbal consciousnesses that manifest their essence through an attempt to comprehend Omensetter’s presence in their reality.