Albee: The Absurd

Edward Albee, winner of Pulitzer Prize three times and Tony Awards twice, is one of America's foremost dramatists and the leading American figure in the Theatre of the Absurd. Albee may be called the most controversial contemporary playwright due to the absurdity in his plays, his rebellion against the tradition, his furious retorts on various critiques on him and his works and his attitude toward homosexuality. In this thesis, I argue that Albee is a representative of the Theatre of the Absurd via a close study of his two masterpieces: The Zoo Story and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? though not a few critics disagree with Martin Esslin's classification that Albee is one of few American exponents of the Theatre of the Absurd. In the course of the anatomy of the two plays, I not only find out the core characteristics of the Theatre of the Absurd, but also discover a parade of deconstructive elements. This thesis consists of four parts.In Chapter One, I give a brief introduction of Albee's works and the factors that affect Albee. Then the reasons why I choose the two plays as my study texts is explained. I also explore the nature of the Theatre of the Absurd as well as the absurdity in Albee's works.Albee is found to possess every feature of the Theatre of the Absurd by the analysis of the two plays. In Chapter Two, I propose that Peter and Jerry, the only two characters in The Zoo Story, are an image of human existence signifying that people are isolated and their life meaningless. They are desperate to communicate with each other but find themselves powerless. And language is proved to be unreliable in communication. The episode of the story between Jerry and the Dog also indicates the failure to communicate. Albee uses long monologues to reveal the loneliness of human beings. The tragic denouement of Jerry's killing himself might reflect his renunciation of the empty husk of existence but might also be viewed as a noble sacrifice. The presentation of Jerry's death also contains the important concept in deconstruction: difference. The uncertainty of interpretation here provides readers with more critical possibility. While most reviewers regard The Zoo Story as anabsurdist examination of the artificiality of American values and the failure of communication, others describe this work as an allegory of Christian redemption in which the young man martyrs himself to demonstrate the value of meaningful communication. The text's undecidability is, therefore, manifested fully.Chapter Three is my detailed analysis of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. George has not amounted to so much as his wife, Martha and his father-in-law, the president of their college, expect. His wish to publish a book goes in vain because of his father-in-law's prevention. His failure disappoints Martha and himself. Martha originally wishes one day George could replace her father but she is left in helplessness. All mirrors the paralysis of human aspiration. The characters' lines are illogical, ambiguous, repetitive, indicating the limitless instability of language. The characters' inability to beget a child symbolizes the sterile futility of being, an absurdist point of view. Martha's father and the imagined son are the confusion of presence and absence and incarnate the deconstructive viewpoint: language determines our experience. The deconstruction of the binary oppositions in Virginia Woolf: reality/ illusion, love/ hate, game/ war helps reveal the absurd nature of being which Albee attempts to express.In Chapter Four, with the interpretation of the two plays aforementioned, I conclude with some discussion on the affinity between Albee's absurdity and Deconstruction, which has not been explored in any other domestic or overseas reviews. In an important sense, the Theatre of Absurd anticipates the oncoming of deconstruction. Albee unconsciously substantiates some doctrines of Deconstruction in his early works, which prove to be the typical masterpieces of the Theatre of the Absurd. The elements of Deconstruction in his plays enhance his absurdity and help distinguish him as the most influential contemporary American playwright.