Communication and miscommunication

Communication and its constant failure are the most persistent themes in Lydia Davis’s work. Many of her stories dramatize the difficulty of connecting through language, showing conversations derailed by misunderstandings, silences, or even a surplus of words.

In “The Meeting,” for instance, the narrator prepares anxiously to impress the university president with carefully chosen words, only to collapse into self-consciousness and humiliation when her speech falters. What remains afterward is not a genuine exchange but the obsessive replaying of what she should have said: a reminder that words often fail in the moment they are most needed. Similarly, in “Letter to a Funeral Parlor,” the narrator fixates on the absurd word “cremains”: a linguistic invention which they feel estranges mourners from the rawness of grief (347). Both stories show how words—far from serving as tools of clarity—can distort or even intensify the...