Character and Code Blending in Chika Unigwe’s Selected Novels
Character and code blending are two very important stylistic techniques that help the text producer in creating the kind of text that appeals to the text recipient. It is believed that text producers feature a variety of character inventions that cut across different strata of the society. They create characters that reflect real human personalities and also match them to appropriate codes in texts making text recipients connect with these character types. This stylistic technique is termed Character-Code Concordance. It is a stylistic technique that enables the novelist to create the right character type and match him or her to the appropriate code to create what is referred to as “linguistic realism”. This is where the text recipient engaging with the text can perceive the language codes/variety used as ideational in nature reflecting or representing the world in which he/she finds himself/herself. Thus, the paper examines selected extracts from Chika Unigwe’s selected novels. It interrogates codes assigned to characters by the author in order to determine whether these codes are appropriate to character and code blending in the selected texts. Findings reveal that characters in selected texts had appropriate codes for interactions. It was also found out that character and code blending projects the positions of characters and reflects the various societal backgrounds they represent. Lastly, the study found that extra-verbal codes, code switching and code mixing for interactions were deployed by characters for effective interaction. The study concludes that Chika Unigwe deploys a spectrum of character types with the right appropriate codes for interactions in the selected texts.
Keywords: blending, character, chika, code, novels, selected, unigwe’s