THE SEMANTIC FIELD OF DEATH IN GIORGIO BASSANI’S NOVEL IL GIARDINO DEI FINZI-CONTINI / SEMANTIČKO POLJE SMRTI U ROMANU IL GIARDINO DEI FINZI-CONTINI GIORGIA BASSANIJA

Abstract

In this article we present the ways in which the semantic field of death is manifested in the novel Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis) by the Italian author Giorgio Basasni. Seeing that semantics is a relatively new science linked to many other sciences such as semiology, stylistics, and logic, in this article we make our contribution to the research of meaning in the Italian language. The article’s main hypothesis is that the author deliberately uses certain vocabulary and semantic procedures in order to avoid the main topic and represent between the lines everything that was not said and, with that in mind, he consciously uses very specific semantic fields, amongst which we have chosen to concentrate on the semantic field of death. Our article’s goal is to present the way in which the choice of vocabulary connects with the literary goals of the author’s memorable prose and how it affects the creation of a more general feeling of a closed and narrow space. We have reached our conclusions using the qualitative methods of discourse analysis and the functional analysis of Bassani’s narrative, thus arriving at the order and logic of his language. Using this novel as the source material, we have analysed the semantic field on both the indirect and direct level, and the different ways of their manifestation throughout the text. Moreover, we have paid attention to the denotative and connotative meaning of symbols within the social context and concluded that the narrative function of the semantic field of death is to influence the reader’s mind by indirectly, but clearly and unequivocally, transferring that which the author does not want or cannot say.