Liberation War of Bangladesh: Silence as Resistance in Select Short Fiction

The paper will be an attempt to locate the use of silence as a literary device by the Bangladeshi writers Akhteruzzaman Elias, Humayun Ahmed and Rizia Rahman in their short narratives The Raincoat, Nineteen Seventy-One and What Price Honour? respectively - to show the subtle act of subversion. In delineating the issue, a close reading of the texts will be playing the key role. The theoretical perspectives offered by Frank O'Connor about the short story as a genre of "the submerged population," Cheryl Glenn's take on silence as a rhetorical act and Charles I. Glicksberg's ideas on literature of silence will be used. The paper will attempt to discuss about the all-pervading role of rumour and gossip along with silence in the time of war as manifest in the select short stories.