Exercise in Interpretation / 3

We are going to establish a complex reading of a very condensed but very poetic and complicated drama by Yeats entitled Purgatory (1938). Read the text carefully, and pay special attention to deixis, story-telling and conflict. You find the text in the Annex.

Interpretation

While reading the drama, you probably felt how much it is necessary and how difficult it is to continuously imagine what is actually going on on the stage. As a matter of fact, we might even argue that it is not possible to read a drama properly for the first time, because we are not yet familiar with the relationship between the characters, their emotions, their conflict, their background and history: elements that we usually get a description of in narrative fiction. For example, it is very difficult to see, to imagine how the young Boy and the old man enter the stage at the very beginning, because we do not know their relationship, and the text won’t say. Is the old man tossing the young Boy to step in front of the house, which he considers important to observe? Is the young Boy frustrated? Do they love or hate each-other? What does the house look like exactly? We only get (sometimes only partial) answers for these questions as we read on in the text.