Town Of Gullen example essay topic

Durrenmatt wrote about the town of Gullen (meaning "excrement" in Swiss), "It is a community which slowly yields to temptation... yet this yielding must be understandable. The temptation is too great, the poverty is too bitter. (The Visit) is a malicious play, but just for that reason, it must be presented without anger and in the most humane way, with sadness yet with humor, for nothing hurts this comedy that ends tragically than brutal seriousness". Durrenmatt uses the people of the town to show the weakness of authority and the disorder, which is just beneath the civilizations order. When the people of Gullen begin to buy expensive items on credit, ll panics, and goes for help to his Family, the Government (the Mayor), the Law (the police chief) and the Church (the minister). He is rebuffed at every turn.

Even the teacher, representing Intellectualism, sees what is happening but is too weak to fight it. With nowhere to turn, ll takes responsibility for his crime. He achieves the serenity and acceptance that Durrenmatt saw as the pinnacle of human heroism. He gains stature in our eyes through this transformation. He can reject the city's offer to commit suicide; the town, too, must be made to face its responsibility.

In The Visit, ll is the only character who changes and grows. Claire is sterile in everything, but her need for revenge; the people of Gullen do nothing but reveal their true, rotten selves. Only ll has the epiphany of self-knowledge that Durrenmatt prized so highly. At the end of the play, with ll dead at the town's feet and Claire's check in the Mayor's hand, "order" and "community" are restored, but now the audience knows these ideas are grotesquely false. As Pep pard writes, In the closing scene, the townspeople appear as much slaves as they did at the beginning; if at first they were victims of poverty; they are now the captives of prosperity. Only ll has found freedom, and he has attained it only by a withdrawal from the community into death.

The historical events that lead up to the writing The Visit was World War II, the biggest war in world history, where millions of lives were lost and where most of the world was living in poverty. In this century, humanity's collective accomplishments made it possible for man to destroy the world. Illusion of stability was not realized, and the twentieth century instead imparted upon humanity a reality composed of conflicts and paradoxes. With the ability to shape the world and a facade of control over the collective destiny of the species we bitterly learned what the ancients summed up as fate, things work out as they do because the circumstances of life are as they are, and the people affected and affecting them are as they are. A sort of double-edged sword that both imparts collective and individual responsibility over man and yet admits to what is essentially his inability to mold the world as he like has imposed upon humanity, a permanent state of cognitive dissonance and complete confusion over mans place in the world. Collectively we suffered two world wars, and the great depression.

Together mankind became a species of exiled aliens, in regards to language culture and countrymen, with a general awareness that we are not in control of our destinies, and that life may just be the universes cruel little mistake. Revelations such as the one noted above moved human beings to search for order and meaning in their lives through avenues such as communities, tradition, and habit. In a world such as ours, man has no choice but to create meaning through his own means. In The Visit, Durrenmatt writes a classical tragedy for the 20th century, a modern answer to ancient questions of honor, loyalty and community. When The Visit was written, the world was on the brink of disaster, and every town was a Gullen. He wrote that in the 20th because we no longer can find tragic heroes, but only tragedies staged by world butchers and carried out by meat-grinding machines.

Durrenmatt believed, Power today is only minimally visible, since like an iceberg the largest part is sunk in faceless abstraction... Todays state has become impossible to survey, anonymous and bureaucratic... genuinely representative people are lacking and the tragic heroes have no name.