Seeking meaning with ambiguity

Ambiguity gives freedom to readers to use their imagination to explore various meanings and interpretations – Roopa Banerjee

Ambiguous words/statements allow for more than one meaning; create confusion, sometimes causing intentional and/or unintentional humour.

For instance in the following sentence, “The boy helped a stray dog in blue pyjamas,” one may think the stray dog was wearing blue pyjamas. However writing the sentence without ambiguity would make things clearer, such as “Wearing blue pyjamas, the boy helped a stray dog.”

Ambiguity is sub-categorised into two types:

Lexical ambiguity (a word having more than one meaning)
Syntactic ambiguity (a sentence having more than one interpretation).

The use of homonyms i.e, words spelled and pronounced similar to another word but different in meaning, can also cause ambiguity. For instance: ‘A good life depends on the liver’ and ‘As the ball raced towards her, we saw her duck’, could mean different things.

But ambiguity is not always unintentional in writing. It is deliberately used by writers to create interest, intensity and depth. Literature abounds with examples of this literary device.

For example, poet John Keats uses ambiguity in the first line of his great poem Ode to a Grecian Urn: “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness…”

Here, ‘still’ is ambiguous — it could mean an unmoving object, or understood as something that is yet to change.

The bard William Shakespeare has used ambiguity on a larger scale. For example, his play Hamlet has a lot of ambiguity in the moral leanings of its eponymous protagonist. When Hamlet kills his uncle Claudius, the audience is left conflicted because he killed to avenge his father’s murder and to protect his mother. However, he is also willing to kill to achieve his aims. This ambiguity is further evidenced when he is traumatised by Ophelia’s death but does not value the effect that his actions will have on others.

Literary works which deploy ambiguity leave a lasting impression on readers’ minds as it lends deeper meaning and depth to the story. Ambiguity gives freedom to readers to use their imagination to explore various meanings and interpretations.

William Empson, the literary scholar has rightly defined ambiguity as “any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language”. It is a potent tool as ambiguous situations entice readers to decide what happens in a story. The interpretation reflects the reader’s own state of mind. If you are optimistic, you would decide that things ended well, or if you are hurt or pessimistic, you might assume that a betrayal was intentional rather than accidental. Authors often deliberately write ambiguous endings in their books to enable readers to blend their life experiences with the words they read.

Strangely, this literary device loses its respectability when it ventures outside the realms of literature. Ambiguity is a powerful tool of political science, and it is the despair of people when politicians use it to obfuscate the meaning of their words.

Exercise

There are many books which leave us with questions about the denouement or a passage within the narrative. These are classic examples of ambiguity.

Here are some famous literary works which have ambiguous middles and endings. Guess the authors of these literary works.