two sealed men inventing a language · S2
Sadistic penal authorities place a blind convict (Watt) and a deaf-mute convict (Leith) together in ‘solitary confinement,’ and the two men attempt to devise ways of communicating with each other.
Context
Cage II is the theme's premise stripped to a lab condition: two men whose channels are surgically mismatched — one without sight, one without hearing or speech — locked together and left to improvise contact from nothing. The whole drama is the attempt to build a channel where none is issued, which is what every character in the novel is doing with subtler equipment.