Signs and Social Meaning in Ayi Kwei Armah’s <i>The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Fragments</i>

Abstract

This paper is a study of the use of signs in Ayi Kwei Armah‘s The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Fragments. It is a known fact that Armah‘s novels are replete with signs. However, existing studies have focused essentially on the literary interpretations of these signs at the detriment of their semiotic implications. In the light of the above, this study undertakes a semiotic analysis of Armah‘s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Fragments with a view to showing how the semiotic system of the novels can be interpreted against the background of codes that may be different from those intended by the author. The study adopts Charles Sanders Peirce‘s semiotic theory as analytical framework and argues that language is a process of signs and that the signification system presents a clear view of communication of meaning in texts. Findings indicate that the use of semiotic signs in the novels underscores not only the themes of corruption, materialism and negation of African traditional values in post-independence Ghanaian society but also how human struggles for existence in a society that tends to submerge values and morals result in the isolation of the major characters in the two novels. The study also reveals that both verbal and non-verbal signs contribute a great deal to the explication of meanings inherent in the novels and that Armah, through the use of semiotic signs, encodes significant meanings that cannot be decoded from a mere surface reading of the novels.