Summary Of Ted Chiang's Story Of Your Life

The short stories of Ted Chiang are written in a way such that the overarching structure help to give a deeper meaning to the stories. The rationale for why Chiang writes in this way is to help vary his writing style and help give the story more meaning without writing more words. Ted Chiang manipulates the structure of one of his works, “Story of Your Life,” for the purpose of augmenting the meaning the story and its underlying themes, while also using it to build a stronger relationship to the audience. In “Story of Your Life,” the way the Chiang breaks up the story is a result of mimicking the main character’s way of cognition. Chiang reinforces this idea when Louise is recalling her and a friend’s experiences, “My internal voice normally spoke in English but that wasn’t a requirement. […] I was thinking and even dreaming in Russian […] I had a friend born of Deaf parents; he grew up using American Sign Language, and he told me that he often thought in ASL instead of English” (Chiang 127). Chiang included this section of text in order to hint to the audience that the language a person knows can influence the way that an individual can think. This framing of the effects of learning a language taking strongly from the early 20th-century idea in linguistics called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the idea that “there’s a link between the shape of language and what people actually talk about” (Panko). During the time that Chiang was writing this