IMPLICATURE CONSEQUENCES OF THE THEME OF MISTAKEN SELF-IDENTITY IN OLA ROTIMI’S THE GODS ARE NOT TO BLAME

Mistaken self-identity is central to birth crisis, uncontrolled temper and passion for responsibility in Ola Rotimi’s The gods are not to Blame (gods) (1971). This paper analyzes the meaning façade revealed by the play’s characters’ dialogic utterances and the engendered consequences. To do this, I focus on the processes of conversational implicature. Conversational implicature (CI) Grice (1975) is an offspring of Austin’s (1962) Speech Act Theory (SAT), and as a sub-theory of pragmatics, it concerns itself with How to Do Things with Words. I hold that meaning can be implicated in a literary text by what the author makes of his characters; that is what the character thinks, does and says, particularly in a dialogic context and the circumstances set up by the author. The main issue in gods is speech act functions and how meaning is implicated within the variable of conversational implicature. I analyze the production of language events and the dynamics of their implicatures as products of ideational factors identified in the play.