THE FUNCTION OF SILENCE AS A NARRATIVE DEVICE IN POSTCOLONIAL FICTION: A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS

This article investigates the function of silence as a structurally and semantically significant narrative device in postcolonial fiction. Moving beyond the conventional understanding of silence as the mere absence of speech, the study examines how deliberate narrative silences — manifested through ellipsis, omission, unfinished dialogue, withheld explanation, and the aesthetics of the unsaid — operate as expressive mechanisms that encode trauma, resistance, power asymmetry, and the limits of representation. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and narrative theorists including Gérard Genette and Mikhail Bakhtin, and through close stylistic analysis of William Golding's Lord of the Flies and Toni Morrison's Beloved, the article demonstrates that silence in postcolonial literary discourse functions simultaneously as a symptom of ideological suppression and as an act of counter-narrative agency. The findings contribute to stylistic and postcolonial literary theory by proposing a typology of narrative silence and by identifying the specific stylistic mechanisms through which silence is rendered productive rather than merely absent.