The Pillowman And Geek Love Analysis

In the texts The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh (2003) and Geek Love by Katherine Dunn (1989) the patterns of cause and effect are rife throughout the stories. In The Pillowman the character Michal kills two children because he says his brother Katurian's stories told him to do so. The cause and effect here is mainly of a Mental sort, writing being something that affects the brain causing it to act. Whereas in Geek Love the most prominent cause and effect comes from the parents of the main protagonists act of experimenting with different substances during pregnancy and therefore causing deformities in their children, this is more of a physical cause and effect rather than metal. The aim of this essay, then, is to explore these two different types of cause and

It was firstly looked at how physical cause and effect are presented more in Geek Love but that The Pillowman does share similarities with it. Geek Love presents the idea that the physical cause of taking substances during pregnancy has the physical effect of deforming the children which parallels with The Pillowman as has an incident where the physical cause of torture has the physical effect of damaging the brain. Then the pattern of mental causes retain mental effect was looked at and how it is mainly presented in The Pillowman but again shares similarities with Geek Love. The mental cause of creating the ideas for stories has the effect of changing the readers thoughts and similarly in Geek Love creating the idea of a cult has the effect of changing peoples thought processes. This was looked at in light of Foucault’s quote on how language translates the will of those who speak it and that Katurian and Arturo’s use of language, the mental cause, had an effect that they may not have originally