Truth And Illusion In Waiting For Godot And Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf
Introduction
Existentialists forcefully believe that one defines their own meaning in life, and that by lack of there being an upper power one must espouse their own existence in order to contradict this essence of ‘nothing-ness’. Absurdist fiction is a genre of literature which concerns characters performing seemingly meaningless actions and experiences due to no found meaning or purpose in their lives, and this prospect of uncertainty is key in both plays Waiting for Godot as well as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Writers Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee use different perspectives on truth and illusion in order to communicate a message to their audience and to make them question the society in which they live in.
Truths and Illusions sub-introduction The play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, plays throughouly into the idea that the characters in the play know
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Martha says the sons protects ‘us', meaning their marriage from dissolving into pieces. They use the idea of a son being a bridge between them to distract from the ultimate unhappiness and disappointment they have for each other.
Consequently, this ‘killing' of the son shows the couple's, or rather George's, grip on reality begin to tighten again as they destroy the illusion keeping them together. The mentioning of the son to someone else shows them losing control over the lines between truth and illusion, and shows the different grips on reality that George and Martha have but this death gives them an opportunity to restart their lives without falsified ideas. In this play, the people ultimately seem to have control over their reality.
"George [tenderly] : I have the right, Martha. We never spoke of it; that's all. I could kill him anytime I wanted to.
Martha: But why? Why?
George: You broke our rule, baby. You mentioned him... you mentioned him to someone else." (Albee
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