Language of Fowles

Knowledge is a tricky thing. When I read Fowles’ work, I find that I am thinking this constantly. Human beings use language to converse with one another and it is a far more basic, and unperfected, theory than I could ever have imagined or realized before without reading Mantissa.
What we say is important. I believe that everyone thinks this is true, yet, many people will also say that how we say that something is even more important. Everyone believes that what we all say to each other actually means the same thing to all of us—this is just a general assumption and whether it has to do with being human or that language is our form of communication I hope to know by the end of reading this novel.
Since language gives us our ability to communicate we believe that it gives us the ability to define ourselves. As Mantissa shows, Miles’ wife believes that specific words have a specific meaning and that the meanings she believes a word to have must be the only definition for that word. “Her mouth began to announce names, people’s names, street names, place names, disjointed phrases. Some were repeated. He had perhaps heard them before, as words but he had no idea what relevance they were supposed to have, nor why they should increasingly sound like evidence of crimes he had committed” (Fowles 5). The words she uses to represent something else, also represent herself since they are definitions of important aspects of her and her husband’s life.
To Miles, the words she speaks have meaning but only as words. He recognizes that he heard them before, but what she is using those words to refer to does not match up with his understanding of them.