Miscommunication and Violence Theme Analysis

In the world of “Speech Sounds,” a mysterious illness has spread around the globe and left most of its survivors unable to speak, read, write, or understand spoken language. Because of this, society has broken down: the government and police no longer exist, armed bandits roam the streets sowing chaos, and when communicating by gesture fails—as it often does—violence erupts between civilians. By narrating a day in the life of Rye, a resident of dystopian Los Angeles who is trying to travel to Pasadena, Octavia Butler shows how the loss of language leads inevitably to chaos and violence.

Butler opens the story by directly linking miscommunication with violence. As Rye takes the bus towards Pasadena, she watches two men “grunting and gesturing at each other,” on the brink of physical violence—they’re engaged in “a disagreement of some kind, or, more likely, a misunderstanding.” As this description makes clear, these men aren’t about to fight because they actually disagree or because their interests are at odds—instead, they’re going to fight simply because they’re failing to communicate. Showing how common this is, Rye correctly predicts how this altercation will go: that they’ll fight as soon as something happens that breaks their “limited ability to communicate,” such as one of their “mock punches” accidentally making contact. Rye is more or less right: the bus hits a pothole and one man is thrown into the other, who interprets this as aggression rather than seeing it as an accident. Without a way to communicate, neither man can de-escalate the fight or clear up what actually happened. This miscommunication leads to a larger brawl between other passengers on the bus, which disrupts their journey. Rye’s reaction suggests that this is a regular occurrence: as soon as the driver hits the brakes, she exits the bus, wanting to duck behind a tree trunk in case the men start shooting. Clearly, this is something she’s experienced before; without language, even the most normal, straightforward activities—like riding the bus—have become fraught with danger.

In addition to provoking violence between strangers, loss of language triggers widespread despair that can make people violent towards themselves and the people they love. Towards the end of the story, Butler reveals the purpose of Rye’s trip to Pasadena: she’s leaving her home to keep herself from suicide. Before the illness, Rye was a historian, writer, and lover of books who was married with children. But the pandemic took everything she most valued: she lost her ability to read and write, her whole family died, and—in a final twist of the knife—the illness “cut even the living off from one another” by ending their ability to communicate, thereby making survivors unable to collectively grieve. Loss of language has taken from Rye what gave her life meaning, and without language, she is on the brink of ending her own life.

In addition to making her contemplate violence against herself, Rye’s inability to read or write provokes a jealousy that stirs violent impulses towards others. When Rye learns that Obsidian—a stranger who becomes her ally and lover—can still read and write, she feels “sick to her stomach with hatred, frustration, and jealousy.” In the midst of these emotions, she notes that, “only a few inches from her hand was a loaded gun.” While Rye does not shoot Obsidian out of jealousy, she speculates that this kind of jealousy does ultimately lead to his death. At the end of the story, they witness a man kill a woman, and when Obsidian tries to intervene, the man kills him, too. Once Rye learns that the dead woman’s children can talk, she speculates that the woman could talk, too, and she guesses that the man killed her because he was jealous that she still had language. Rye believes that “the passions that must have driven him” were “anger, frustration, hopelessness, insane jealousy”—the same emotions that made her want to kill Obsidian earlier. Furthermore, she shows how widespread this kind of jealous violence is when she thinks that this man is just one of many people who are “willing to destroy what they could not have.” This suggests that they live in a world of widespread despair over the loss of language, which has robbed people of something universally precious.

Throughout the story, Rye is clear-eyed about the connection between loss of language and escalating violence: she sees how simple miscommunication, jealousy, and personal anguish are all, in the wake of the illness, routinely fatal. This leads her to bigger conclusions about the future of humanity: she pities the children growing up in this world, burning books as fuel, running through the streets and “hooting like chimpanzees.” Rye says that these children have “no future. They were now all they would ever be.” Losing language, she believes, has robbed people of their humanity—their ability to develop meaningful lives and relationships—leaving them, essentially, violent animals. And while the story ends with some hope for the future, that hope rests entirely on the return of language: the young children that Rye rescues can speak, which makes her wonder if the illness is over, or, at the very least, whether she can imagine a future where she isn’t alone. Despite this cautiously optimistic ending, it’s important to remember that this optimism rests on language. If it weren’t for the possibility of language returning, Butler suggests that the world would continue to be a dismal place of chaos, despair, and relentless violence.