Exploring the Absurdity of War and International Aid in the Novel 'Red Birds' by Mohammad Hanif: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Discourse is a wide-ranging term to cover many forms of human utterances and textual forms of communication. Development through multiple stages gave birth to CDA which bridges the micro-structure of linguistic choices to macro-structures of social reality. Theorists like Van Dijk, Fairclough, and Fowler contributed to its development with the foundation provided by Halliday's SFL. The qualitative research endeavors to analyze 'Red Birds', a novel written by Mohammad Hanif under Huckin's model of CDA to highlight the absurdity of war and international aid. The three dimensions of Fairclough's model are at the background of Huckin's model. The analysis has been carried out at three levels i.e. broad level, sentence level, and word level. A well-thought analysis reveals the nature of war in a region where there is nothing to destroy. It has also been concluded that the aid programs are nothing more than 'making them orphan and then adopting them' which clearly runs incongruous to the spirit of aid.