A Study Of Indeterminacy In Character Portrayal In Sam Shepard’s Theatre

Sam Shepard is a great playwright of contemporary American theatre. With a career that now spans over four decades, he has experienced a clearly evolutionary process in the playwriting. But most of the current studies focus more on the interpretations of his family sagas and pay less attention to his other plays, especially the later works, When the World Was Green (1996), Eyes for Consuela (1998) and The Late Henry Moss (2000).Hence, based on Ihab Hassan’s theory of indeterminacy, the thesis explores the character portrayal in these plays and probes into the root causes of the characters’ indeterminacy. In addition to a brief account of the playwright’s life and career, the introductory part gives a review of the major criticism on Shepard and postmodernist indeterminacy theory. Then the following chapters analyze the indeterminacy in his character portrayal from three aspects:characters’language, typical character types, and the causes of characters’indeterminacy.The characters’language functions as an amplifier of emotion rather than a communicative means. Together with the actions in the metaphorical settings, the rhythmic language makes Shepard’s stage a visual and auditory feast. The uncertainty is intensified through the two typical character types-ghost characters and doppelganger characters. These two kinds of types disintegrate the continuity of time and juxtapose the past and the present on stage, dislocate the integrity of a character and reveal the playwright’s idea of "a fractured whole". The causes of indeterminacy lie in the illusionary self-identification of male figures. They try to identify the manhood through the glorification of American Western myth, domestication of "second sex" and inheritance of patriarchal heritage. But in a postmodern wasteland, male’s self-identification is an inescapable circle of eternal loss. On this basis, the thesis draws a conclusion that Shepard’s character portrayal shows a tendency of indeterminacy, which is one of his most distinct artistic features and reflects his understanding of human’s self-identification in the postmodern context.