Djaout ironist

Abstract

What is at stake in Les Chercheurs d’os , a sharp novel written by Djaout? Assuredly, Djaout could rightly label himself a realist: he sticks to reality, despite all the social and psychological hindrances that tend to keep the mind far from reality. Reality chiefly deals with how your body reacts to the world ; in that respect, irony challenges the various speeches that endorse idealistic points of
view and thus deny the predominance of the body and its continuous relation to the world. Irony needs to be distinguished from the similar notion of humour .
The former focuses on irrelevant but honest speeches; the latter debunks irrelevant and misleading speeches. This study analyses a range of ironical devices in Les Chercheurs d’os : explicit irony is to be found in microstructural rhetorical figures, which involves the 1984-text (the linguistic environment); implicit irony requires a more subtle interpretation which activates an extensive
knowledge of the context of the novel.