As the Father himself points out, his phrase is ambiguous-it “tells us nothing.” It can mean almost anything: a vision of life as a grand experiment with no fixed answers and no clear truths to guide human action, the Father’s specific remorse about the ill-fated “experiments” he performed on his family, the way the family’s events resulted from complex circumstances, or even the way creating works of art is a constantly experimental process, based in cooperation and conflict among various forces (characters, events, actors, writers, and audiences). His insistence that the Father will inevitably and annoyingly talk about “the Demon of the Experiment” and the Father’s own cynicism about the use of language both suggest that people’s efforts to control and improve the world always fall short-people can think or talk endlessly and not change the fundamentally random nature of life and inevitable nature of fate. The Son’s predictions (which later, like all the predictions in this play, prove true) again show that the audience receives the drama in reverse, trying to understand what has already happened among the Characters that makes them act like they do. She appears to be an unreliable narrator but ultimately proves the opposite: she is merely declaring the family’s horrible but unavoidable fate. This is thus also the opposite of verbal irony: the Step-Daughter directly says what will happen, giving away the mystery of the family’s pain and the climax of the play, but because of the extraordinary circumstances of her and the other Characters’ arrival in the theater, no one takes her at face value and everyone assumes she cannot be telling the truth. In fact, they directly tell these audiences what they do not know. This is the opposite of dramatic irony, with the Characters knowing something that their audiences-the Manager and his Actors, and the audience in the theater-do not. The Step-Daughter puts on a spectacle, acting out in a way that seems inappropriately juvenile for an eighteen-year-old-especially one who proclaims her sexual “passion.” Although her declarations about the family look like senseless ramblings now, they later end up making sense.
0 kommentar(er)
