On The Absurdity Of Edward Albee’s Two Representative Absurd Works

As the first American dramatist who introduced absurdist techniques andthematic concerns into American literature, Edward Albee rejuvenated Americandrama, drawing world wide attention from critics and scholars at home and abroad.Traditionally linked with the Theatre of the Absurd, the similarity of Albee’s work withthose of the European absurdist playwrights like Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter andEugene Ionesco is often studied. Few scholars have paid attention to Albee’s distinctwriting characteristic, for instance, his realistic dealing with the plot and setting, hischoice of progressive structure of plays rather than circular one, his description ofabsent and prototypical characters as well as characters with violence and also hisoptimistic attitude toward life. Based on a close reading of his two early plays The ZooStory and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, this thesis aims to probe Albee’smanipulation of the Theater of the Absurd: the inheritance of traditional absurd theaterin his plays, and what’s more, his development of and contribution to the Theatre ofthe Absurd in light of Camus’s and Sartre’s Existentialism, Astraud’s the Theater ofCruelty and Baudrillard’s theory on Simulation.