Underpinning The Ideology in Graham Greene’s Short Story ‘A Chance for Mr. Lever’- A Transitivity Analysis

Abstract

Ideology is a set of assumptions, a belief system that a group of people share. There are different ways of encoding ideology and literature is one of them. Literature operates the tool of language to achieve desired effect. Infact as Simpson (1993:6) notes, ‘language reproduces ideology’, language has become a major method for reinforcing the existing ideology or to develop a new one. Hence the study of language is useful to uncover the hidden ideologies at work in a text. The present paper aims at identifying and explaining hidden ideology at work in Graham Greene’s short story ‘A Chance for Mr. Lever’. And it makes use of Halliday’s Transitivity model to study the main character’s personality, as linguistic choices helps in clarifying dominant ideologies. These ideologies are presented by processes used in the clauses.