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Rhapsody At The Bridge Themes

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One of the main themes in the story is that of the sea. Because her sons are always leaving her to be killed by the sea along with her husband, Maurya has become terrified of its power and wants desperately to find a way to save her two remaining sons from its power. In the end, however, she cannot do so and the final two end up drowning and the incredible power of the sea both as an attraction and a destroyer is made evident. The main theme concerns the power of the sea. As an island, Ireland has a very powerful connection to the sea. In many ways, the sea is both provided and destroyer. It can be as much of a boon as a hindrance. The only connection that the inhabitants have to the mainland is through the sea, and in that way it provides …show more content…

The desolate stony Aran Islands were the last outposts of man’s husbandry in the Atlantic and comprised of the most primitive peasantry in Europe. The play depicts the misfortune of a family that has lost all its seven mail members to the Sea, and is about to lose its final bread-winner Bartley. Synge said of the Araners, “I could not help feeling that I was talking with men who were under a judgment of death”. Bartley is shown in the play to be under this judgment of Death, governed by the fate-symbolizing Sea. In spite of the repeated cries of his mother Maurya, desperately clinging to the last vestiges of her motherhood, Bartley silently and resolutely walks towards his Fate and meets his inevitable end as he his dashed by the sea-waves against the white rocks of the shore. This inevitability of destruction at the hands of Fate, gives the play its distinct Greek spirit. Towards the end of the play when Maurya resigns, “No man can be living forever and we must be satisfied”, it is the deep fatalism of her race that rushes forth through these words. The sea is the “Immanent Will” in front of which the characters of the play bow down just like Oedipus who accepts the inscrutable ways of Fate. Thus we see how the Irish setting of the poverty-stricken fate-mauled craggy Aran island has been utilized for soaking the play in the Greek spirit of fatalism. The tragic conflict between Man and Fate in Greek tragedies is found here in the struggle between the lives of the Araners and the Sea.
Another theme is that of loss and the inevitability of it. Of course her sons and her father did not have to go to sea and not everyone who goes to sea drowns, but Maurya finds a sort of fate in the power of the sea over her family and her dreams and her waking life are haunted with the power of the sea to reach out and take away her most precious

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