There isn’t even room to seriously entertain the possibility that Ajay himself is meant to operate as the fool.
This might incline a reading of the American pronunciation toward an indication of comic status, marking the characters ignorant or uninterested in the struggle that is supposed to motivate the action of the story, except that Ajay himself is marked in the same way. They are side-quest characters or optional characters for multiplayer co-op use. Most of the characters who use the American pronunciation are outsiders, not just non-Kyrati, but incidental to the primary campaign storyline. In Ajay’s pre-recorded dialog, he seems to agree to just about anything anyone asks him to do, sometimes leading with “I’m in” even before the player is asked whether to pursue or decline a particular choice.)īut, as persistent as the disparate pronunciations may be-no character ever alters their pronunciation, and Ajay never corrects anyone or insists except in his own habits on a particular pronunciation-Ajay’s role in the story disrupts most possible interpretations. Is Ajay’s own pronunciation the mark of the tension between the generations of an immigrant family in the U.S.? (We’re never told anything about Ajay’s life before the beginning of the game, and it is never revealed whether Ajay’s mother-whose death precipitates his return to Kyrat-pronounces her last name or his with two syllables or one.) Is Ajay’s continued use of the American pronunciation a sign of his resistance to revolutionary role that so many of the people around him seem desperate for him to fulfill? (It seems unlikely. I might be inclined, if the whole thing didn’t seem so incidental, to try and figure out whether Far Cry 4 was trying to make a statement about how identities are adopted and adapted, the transition between being a tourist and becoming a member of a community, or even the way in which being misnamed leaves traces-scars-on our own construction of ourselves. The one Kyrati who uses the American pronunciation seems to be the only character doing so for a reason-to deny the Kyrati heritage the game’s story foists upon Ajay, and attempt to undermine the despot’s seemingly inexplicable fondness for this outsider. Of the six non-player characters who use what I’m going to call the American pronunciation, five (including the State Department bureaucrat) are foreigners in Kyrat, and there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of intention on their part. For the hours and hours of recorded dialog, there’s actually not that much to go on. Gale,” what exactly the variety of pronunciations were trying to signify. I tried to figure out, as Ajay meets a pair of Western con artist backpackers and, later, Pagan Min’s military commander who addresses him as “A.J. It’s a nice little joke until it’s revealed, on one of the rare occasions when Ajay says his own name, that he pronounces it as a single syllable, exactly the same as the man from the State Department. As Ajay escapes from the despot, Pagan Min, and begins to explore Kyrat with the help of the resistance, The Golden Path, his last name is pronounced almost universally with two syllables, his first name with a soft, extended long A rather than sharper, more traditionally American long A as pronounced in say, The Fonz’s monosyllable catchphrase.
I initially interpreted the single syllable version of the last name to be the error of an indifferent bureaucrat, a nod by the game to the way it can seem that the single effective purpose of the low level official functionary is to mangle every name they encounter. Ghale” (spelled with a silent H and rhyming with “fail”) on a recorded message by an American State Department official advising against travel in the small Himalayan nation of Kyrat, the young man is soon kidnapped by the local despot who insists on calling him AH-jay GAH-lay. First addressed, somewhat uncertainly, as “Mr. There’s a bit of internal controversy, as Far Cry 4 gets started, over the name of the protagonist.
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