It Was Because of That That I Spoke: Self-Justification in Wijesinghe’s “Roots”

This analysis considers the speech of the narrator in the first-person short story 'Roots' as a complex act of self-justification. In order to present herself favorably to the interlocutor, the narrator draws on local conceptions of responsibility and meaning construction in her use of multiple strategies. By showing how she distributes responsibility for her utterance to a range of human and nonhuman participants in the story, this analysis supports criticisms of personalist theories with regard to the amount of emphasis placed on intention. Moreover, it suggests that the distinction between intentionful and intentionless meaning is not binary but, rather, continuous. In order to accomplish this distribution of responsibility, the narrator mitigates the linguistic form of her utterance, which shows that distribution of responsibility can be an intermediate step in the use of indirectness to protect face. Finally, she presents her utterance as constituting actions other than an insult, notably the rescue of her husband from a dangerous situation. This multifaceted approach accords well with recent work that argues for the possibility of mitigating speech not only in linguistic form but in discourse frame and participant role structure as well.