A Stylistic Analysis of Meaning-Making in Albee’s The Zoo Story: Grice’s Maxims, Politeness, and Turn-Taking

This style study uses Grice's maxims, Brown and Levinson's politeness theory, and Short's framework for turn-taking to look at how people make sense of Albee's absurdist play “The Zoo Story” (1958). The research reveals that Albee purposely breaks the rules of language to make points about being alone, failed connections, and social stratification. This goes against the idea that absurdist theater doesn't use language to communicate. Jerry constantly breaks Gricean maxims (relation, quantity) by talking about things that don't matter, saying the same things over and over, and asking too many questions. This shows that he doesn't have many friends and makes it hard for him to have normal conversations. Peter, on the other hand, is polite and doesn't do things that could hurt his reputation, which makes the differences between classes even clearer. Jerry's long turns, changing the subject, and interruptions show how powerful he is. Peter, on the other hand, is passive because he only makes short turns and doesn't do much. These ways of using language show how the play criticizes modern loneliness (the "zoo" metaphor) and how important language is to Albee's absurdist theater. To fully understand what "theater of the absurd" means, the study found that pragmatics and discourse analysis play a big role.