Analysis Of Ted Chiang's Story Of Your Life

The short stories of Ted Chiang are written in a way for the overarching structure to give deeper meaning to the stories. The rationale for why Chiang writes in this way is to help vary his writing style and helps to focus the theme into a more limited amount of words. One might view this as just a normal variation in the way of writing that most authors have in their writing style. However, this view overlooks the themes that Chiang presents in his works and when combining those themes with the focus of the work, it reveals that he wants to have larger themes that support those themes expressed within the text. Ted Chiang manipulates the structure of one of his works, “Story of Your Life,” for the purpose of augmenting the meaning the story and its underlying themes, while also using it to

In “Story of Your Life,” the way the Chiang breaks up the story is a result of mimicking the main character’s way of cognition. Chiang reinforces this idea when Louise is recalling her and a friend’s experiences, “My internal voice normally spoke in English but that wasn’t a requirement. […] I was thinking and even dreaming in Russian […] I had a friend born of Deaf parents; he grew up using American Sign Language, and he told me that he often thought in ASL instead of English” (Chiang 127). Chiang included this section of text in order to hint to the audience that the language a person knows can influence the way that an individual can think. This framing of the effects of learning a language taking strongly from the early 20th-century idea in linguistics called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the idea that “there’s a link between the shape of language and what people