Shepard Described By Family Tragedy

American playwrights have long been exploring the disintegration of the family, and the family has remained an essential subject for the American stage. But few dramatists had dissected the American family in the same way as Shepard had done. Sam Shepard wrote his family trilogy in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which includes Curse of the Starving Class (1976), Buried Child (1978), and True West (1980), all characterized by realistic features. This thesis attempts to analyze his family trilogy in three aspects: its origin, its theme and its realistic features. In the first part, there is an introduction, which provides a rough sketch of Shepard's legendary life experience as well as his family background. In the second part, there is an illustration of the origin of his family trilogy by analyzing his two early family plays: The Rock Garden and The Holy Ghostly. Finally, through the analysis of the coherent plot-planning, poetic dramatic monologue and discourse, a conclusion is drawn that Shepard's family tragedies tend to subtly delineate the inner world of the characters, who have been struggling between self-contradiction and the society for a sense of harmony.