The Pitiful Human Condition Exposed in Endgame, Dumbwaiter, and The Horse Dealer's Daughter
The three stories, The Endgame (Beckett), The Dumbwaiter (Pinter), and The Horse Dealer's Daughter (Lawrence) all deal with the themes of repression, repetition, and breakdowns in communication. The stories show us the subjectivity of language and exemplify the complexities of the human condition.
Samuel Beckett arrived on earth in Ireland on Good Friday, April 13, 1906. He then spent the rest of his life wanting to be somewhere else. Beckett's life was one of silence, solitude, and depression. He felt he did not belong in this world and he was disenchanted with societal convention and the hum-drum existence that was
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The play premiered on April 3, 1957 at the Royal Court Theatre in London in French and was Beckett's second masterpiece.
Beckett's plays typically take place in one room - signifying a type of prison to its inhabitants. The characters endlessly repeat patterns of behavior such as repetitive questions, looking out windows, and telling the same stories. These repetitions are symbolic of the inane repetitions that human beings make every day - wake up, go to work, come home, go to sleep.
The absolute meaninglessness of this repetition is part of the human condition. The wait for death is unavoidable. The human being is born, lives, and then dies. Beckett's point is that there is no meaning to life, he calls it 'absurd'. Beckett participated in "The Theater of the Absurd", which was a French movement in the fifties' and wrote plays with this theme of 'nothingness'.
Influenced by Beckett and The Theater of the Absurd was Harold Pinter. Important to understanding Pinter's plays is understanding the nature of silence. Pinter "categorized speech as that which attempts to cover the nakedness of silence." In The Dumbwaiter, the dumb-waiter symbolizes a disconnection in human communication. The two characters, Gus and Ben, are hit-men awaiting orders on who is their next victim. Their orders are (presumably) finally sent down from the above floor via the dumb-waiter. The characters, like the
Kelley use repetition many times throughout the piece. She uses it to have ideas and phrases stick with her
By having Everyman interact with these conceptualized characters, the author externalizes his inner conflict. Perhaps this technique seems too obvious or almost condescending to our more literate age, but whatever the case, it effectively conveys the central message of the play.
While Beckett’s works are often defined by their existentialist themes, Endgame seems to offer no solution to the despair and melancholia of Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and Nell. The work is replete with overdetermination that confounds the efforts of critics and philosophers to construct a single, unified theme for the play. Beckett resisted any effort to reconcile the problems of his world, offer solutions, or quench any fears overtly. However, this surface level of understanding that aligns Beckett with the pessimism of the Modernist movement is ironically different from the symbolic understanding that Beckett promotes through his characters and the scene. Beckett’s work does not suggest total hopelessness,
Truman Capote’s novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, is an American classic that has spawned several multimedia adaptations, such as a film and multiple plays. It is a multi layered piece of work that contains several themes that can be found in various separate texts. These include, but are not limited to, the Triarchic Theory of Intelligence in the book Outliers, Gender Types and Roles in the play A Streetcar Named Desire, and Isolation and “Catching” in the novel Catcher in the Rye.
In the play “Grand Concourse,” the talented playwriter and actress Heidi Schreck develops a plot based on the natural human conflict about the forgiveness toward unintentional actions. Heidi Schreck is a recognized writer who has been awarded with one-year residency by New York's Playwrights Horizons (Silk Road Rising 17,18). Named after the main street of the Bronx in New York City, the play shows the conflict that its characters face in the internal war between goodness and evil. The opposition between the actions of Emma (antagonist) and Shelley (protagonist) shows the complexity of human compassion towards the evil (sometimes unintentional) actions. Looking at the main actions of Emma in the play she egotistically seems to manipulate all the characters to feel better about herself. However, a deeper glazing indicates that her depression leads her to hurt people around her unintentionally; she tries to get forgiveness, but she realizes that the solution it is more complex that just an apologize.
Although there are situational and developmental variables at stake, ultimately, Beckett is dealing with an existential crisis. He is coming face to face with his own mortality, and in so doing, confronts moral and ethical issues related to his relationship with his law firm and colleagues.
The author asks question in the play, what happens when you die? Everyman looks back into his life and tries to find a time that he can give up but he is not ready to do so. Throughout the play, Everyman begins to realize the things he thought were important
At first glance, Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” Susan Glaspell’s Trifles, and Henrik Isben’s A Doll House seem to have nothing in common. However, the short story and plays have many similarities. Particularly, five women from these tales— Louise Mallard, Minnie Wright, Mrs. Peters, Mrs. Hale, and Nora Helmer—make drastic decisions that appear to be motiveless. Without context, any reader could be confused by Louise’s death, Nora’s departure, and Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale’s unanimous effort to cover up the murder that Minnie Wright committed, which also seems to lack serious motive. However, all of these women’s settings, situations, and lives have connections that make their motives similar. Emotion motivates all five women—not just
Brenda Zavala March 16th, 2015 Character Analysis project: Part 2 Commonplace Journal Entry one Hamlet His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Theme – the reason behind why the playwright wrote the play. “Patterns of life”, a slice of reality.
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett's existential masterpiece, for some odd reason has captured the minds of millions of readers, artists, and critics worldwide, joining them all in an attempt to interpret the play. Beckett has told them not to read anything into his work, yet he does not stop them. Perhaps he recognizes the human quality of bringing personal experiences and such to the piece of art, and interpreting it through such colored lenses. Hundreds of theories are expounded, all of them right and none of them wrong. A play is only what you bring to it, in a subconscious connection between you and the playwright.
Likewise, this journal discusses the mystery of death as depicted in the play Hamlet. In the repercussion of his dad 's death, Hamlet gets obsessed with the notion of demise. All through the play, he considers demise from awesome various perspectives. He supposes both the profound result of death, represented in the phantom and the substantial stays of the dead, like the decaying corpses in the cemetery. And since death in the play is the cause as well as the consequence of vengeance, then it is intimately tied to the subject of vengeance and justice.
Though clearly embodying elements of a revenge tragedy, Hamlet can also be viewed as a work concerning existentialism. Throughout the play, the titular character, Hamlet, demonstrates a struggle with existential angst – the overwhelming awareness of the brevity and seeming meaninglessness of life (MacIntyre). Hamlet frequently reflects on the ultimate end to all life – death – and famously wonders if it’d be “nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or…to die;” his internal battle over his existence is one that can be seen throughout his many soliloquys and manic speeches. After the death of his father and his mother’s hasty remarriage to Claudius, Hamlet finds himself grappling with the reality of his world, feeling lost and without guidance. In the wake of his father’s ghost’s visit, Hamlet is seized by both dread and obligation. His duty to avenge his father is one which jars him; though he devotes himself to its accomplishment, the endeavor forces him to question his morality and fate. Hamlet’s dilemma causes him to lose connection with those around him, leaving him isolated with only his internal crises and quest for revenge. Hamlet’s desolate loneliness – a result of his perceived abandonments – fosters his philosophical ponderings on the usefulness and morality of living in the face of fate and destiny
Postmodern literature depicts the degradation of human psyche and the struggle of the man to find his identity after destruction that the World War II caused to the humanity. The war ruined the human values and every human being had lost the sense of moral and immoral. Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot belong to the postmodern literary category that showcase in the most comic and tragic way the pessimistic vision of humanity struggling vainly to find a purpose in their existence. Vladimir and Estragon, Ben and Gus are the hopeless and anxious victims of the war who are controlled from unknown authorities. In this context, the ability to communicate with each other, to take decisions for themselves and to
Similar to Hamlet’s fascination, the theme of death is also shown in this play through his revelation of the finality of death. In the fifth act of this play Hamlet witnesses death on the deepest level yet as he stares death in the face while holding the skull of Yorick. At this point Hamlet begins to see life’s impermanence "... Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make