Explanation Of 'Rhinoceroses In William Shakespeare's Play'

The very ‘title’ of the play is a deliberate construction on the part of the playwright. To explain his usage of it, Ionesco states, “When people no longer share your opinions. When you can no longer make yourself understood by them, one has the impression of being confronted with monsters- rhinos for example… and history has shown us during the last quarter of the century that people thus transformed not only resemble rhinos, but really rhinoceroses.” The collective consciousness of the people is depicted in the very first encounter with the rhinoceros in the play; when “…a noise is heard, far off but swiftly approaching, of a beast panting in its headlong course and of a long trumpeting.” The incapacity of individual responses is reflected in the verbatim reactions of the Waitress, the Grocer and Jean who state “Oh, a rhinoceros!” Through

We need to decipher what the rhinoceros meant to us. For Ionesco, “the police are rhinoceroses. The judges are rhinoceroses…revolutions are doings of rhinoceroses.” Berenger questions his understanding of the rhinoceroses by asking “are they practice or are they theory?” also he believes that the rhinoceroses are anarchic because they are in the minority. Accordingly, every inhuman regime numerically is minority prospered by the silence of the majority sense of solidarity ironically becomes a ploy as people want to be rhinoceroses, as statistics have changed and the substructures tilt towards the transfiguration. This also leads us to the question of “goodness”, the moment one sees good in evil, one is interpolated into the dominant ideology. This is located in Berenger’s perpetual anxiety to remain human and his ability to act in an unselfish way by helping Jean in his moment of crisis. The larger question that they play asks is what have we evolved into from our primeval stage of