Two recent Jamaican novels convey mental and social imbalance by departing from conventions of discourse. Both John Hearne, in The Sure Salvation, and Anthony Winkler, in The Lunatic, establish their characters' perspectives on the world by manipulating and at times deviating from linguistic norms. In this way each writer highlights the individual's aliena tion from society and associates it with distorted judgement or with warped values in the society that he portrays. In the creation of a reliable or unreliable consciousness the writer adheres to or departs from a logical thread of narrative discourse, from conventional spatial and temporal frameworks (indicated by such linguistic features as tense and person), or from traditional mores of literary narrative. Because language is both a social phenomenon and rule-governed behaviour, individual or social deviance is clearly communicated through deviance in language. Both The Sure Salvation and The Lunatic convey violent distortion in individual perspective and in social values by flouting rules of narrative discourse. Much earlier fiction preserves signs of a fission between perception and reality that later comes to be associated with deviance both as a theme and as a linguistic choice. Preparatory reference to such earlier work clarifies the development, in Jamaican fiction, of a particularly revealing perspec tive on violence in society, the perspective of the disordered consciousness that both Hearne and Winkler vividly convey. The action of a nineteenth century novel, Marly, unfolds in the rigidly structured setting of plantation slavery. This is a system of enforced aliena tion between groups, a separation entrenched by closed vision, stereotyping and language barriers. The novel's protagonist, Marly, overtly recognizes the system's instability and the narrative hints with contained hysteria at the enormous, latent violence implied by this unbalanced social