Chapter 4, Communicating Summary and Analysis

When people wish to communicate, they usually find ways, but in the 1970s, "incommunicability" is proposed: humans are monads capable only of truncated messages destined to be misunderstood. Discourse is seen as a veil over existential silence. This theory is biologically and socially false: humans speak; non-humans do not. Refusing to communicate brings angst. Survivors experience this in a particular way. When people complain about cold, hunger, or fatigue, survivors spontaneously think, "What do you know?" but cannot get the reality across.

Tourists make a game of understanding; immigrants receive help in adjusting to cultural transplantation, but in the Lagers, prisoners who know no German fall into a world "filled with a dreadful sound and fury signifying nothing." Many survivors pick up words and fragments in unknown languages that anchor them in daily life, in the same way that...