METONYMY AND RHETORICAL DECONSTRUCTION OF TEXTUAL MEANING IN "THE SOUND OF SILENCE"

"The way of sound aligns with governance", Paul Simon's classic song "The Sound of Silence" is regarded as both a "song of alienation" and a zeitgeist overture. Through rich rhetorical devices, the lyrics achieve semantic displacement and unconventional combinations, creating poetic beauty through deviation while triggering listeners/readers to engage in figurative reasoning about the deeper meaning within the lyrics, thereby experiencing implicit aesthetic pleasure and the joy of contemplative understanding. This paper chooses to deconstruct, from the perspectives of cultural and religious metonymy, how the lyrics artistically achieve cognitive reference to the American counter-culture movement of the early 1960s from within the discourse. Through rhetorical reading, literary texts can deconstruct themselves. Meanwhile, due to different contexts, metonymic references will be altered in a chain of signification, making the interpretation of the textual meaning in "The Sound of Silence" inevitably indeterminate. KEYWORDS: Metonymy, Rhetorical Reading, The Sound of Silence, Figurative Language, Deconstruction