John Patrick Shanley’s short play Doubt: A Parable (2005) can be deemed a critique of the concepts of truth and certainty. The way these themes are realized in the play’s text through the characters’ dialogues is of cardinal importance, yet to date this aspect of Shanley’s work has apparently not garnered any critical attention. Adopting a pragmatic-stylistic approach, this paper studied the utterances made by two of the main characters of the play, namely Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius, based on Austin’s and Searle’s speech act theories and Grice’s notion of cooperative principle to illuminate the characters’ locutions and illocutions and, consequently, the ethical conflicts and emotional tensions between them. The main problems dealt with included how Sister Aloysius employs conditional threats and groundless accusations to make Flynn leave her school, how Flynn reluctantly considers these illocutionary threats as felicitous and resigns from his job, and finally why Sister Aloysius admits that she doubts everything she has said and done. Thus, this study demonstrated how such a linguistic analysis of the representation of characters’ discourses in a play can help us interpret their intentions and motivations more effectively, thereby gaining a deeper appreciation of the play’s characterization and themes.
