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Renaming "Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler

If I were to rename one of our short stories, I would change “Speech Sounds” by Octavia Butler to “Silent Communication.” Throughout her story, Butler focuses on the non-verbal interactions between characters and their effects. In the opening scene two men are pretending to fight on the bus, but due to an accident, one man accidently strikes the other and they break out into a real fight. In this scene, if the two were able to talk, they could have immediately apologized to prevent the fight from escalating. However their inability to talk is what initiated action. In this scene, Speech Sounds does not seem relevant. The action between the two men is not about speech, but the lack of speech.

Later in the story, when Rye meets Obsidian, they are able to communicate to each other with the various items they are holding to express their names. They are able to go from being complete strangers to becoming familiar with each other without talking at all. This part of the story has an emphasis on the way they are able to get to know each other non verbally. “Speech Sounds” does not seem to fit as a title because the characters do not speak to each other at all. If Rye and Obsidian were able to talk, the entire plot of the story would be different. The setting of the story would no longer be an apocalyptic and silent world. Obsidian would no longer have the same, mysterious demeanor. There would no longer be the same confusion amongst characters about what each other’s intentions were.  Overall, the story and plot would be very different.

I think “Silent Communication” would be able to effectively captivate the idea that the characters need to navigate through the world without talking to each other. With the current title, there seems to be too much focus on the moments where the characters do talk and not enough on the rest of the story where they do interact with other people but silently.

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