Human Comedy in Wole Soyinka’s Jero’s metamorphosis: A Pragmatic Analysis

Abstract

Falsity has turned the best-seller commodity rampantly symptomatic of interpersonal relations within/between most contemporary African nations. Roughly everybody strives adamantly for somebody to lull, betray and suckle to the bone. Combating such insidious victimization has long remained part of most African writers’ concerns. Unfortunately, the latter’s endeavours seem to go misfiring insomuch as the fact keeps steadily worsening. Thence comes to be spurred the rationale sustaining this article, the leading hypothesis of which is: most readers don’t grab the intrinsic intent and philosophy lurking behind the allegorical language of literature. Accordingly, our objective is to accompany readers to more successfully decipher Soyinka’s works so as to make his societal mission more operational. So, our work leans on the principles and methods of pragmatics to analyze an excerpt from the target play. Findings reveal that Soyinka is an alert satirist who makes fun of social maladies while indirectly urging for wiping them away from the human psyche.