I First level of meaning

The levels of meaning in the play are actually not very complicated, but the structure is very condensed and masterful, a perfect example of tragic tension. The genre of the play is obviously a tragedy, but this we will see only in the end. The Old Man brings his son here in front of the house, where the Old Man was born, but first we do not know if this is on purpose. We get to know that his mother’s soul is suffering in the house, which is Purgatory for her now, the place of suffering for sinning souls. The sin of his mother is that she was in love with the Old Man’s father, a drunkard, and she was willing to sleep with him and thus she has to go through the memory of this wedding night again and again as a punishment. Today is the anniversary of the wedding night, this is why the Old Man brings his son here, and this is why he is seeing the visions of the wedding-night in the windows of the now derelict house.

We gradually start to understand, as we move on reading the text, that the play is actually unfolding on two levels simultaneously: The Old Man is telling his story about his mother’s wedding might and his life as a young Boy, and in the meantime he is standing in front of the run-down house of the once prosperous family with his young son.  After a while, we recognize parallels, analogies between the two levels: things in the Old Man’s story correspond to things in the present: he has with him the same jack-knife which he used to kill his father; he was sixteen years old then and his son is sixteen right now; the Old Man never got proper education from his drunkard father, and this is what his son also accuses him of now. These repetitions or parallels start building up an expectation in us: as the tension grows, as the Old Man and the Boy start arguing and then fighting, we are preparing for the same thing that happened sixteen years ago to happen now again: the Boy, who is now sixteen, will most probably kill his father, and he even cries out. “What if I killed you?”

However, there is a sudden unexpected twist in the plot: contrary to our expectations, the Old Man kills his son, as he confesses, to put an end to this bloodline of corruption, and to please God. We get know that he has brought the young Boy here on purpose. He wanted to sacrifice him in order to ask God to deliver his mother’s soul from Purgatory. When the murder is completed, the symbolical hoof beats recur, indicating that the father is coming home from the pub, and the wedding night is going to happen again: his mother’s soul will not be delivered from the house where it is suffering. As the Old Man himself claims, he has become twice a murderer, and all for nothing: he has been unsuccessful in trying to manipulate God in his decisions.

The tragedy is built up according to the classical pyramid-like structure, with a rising action part and a falling action part, employing the elements of tragedy defined by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics (ca. 335 BC). In the rising action we have an initial conflict between the two characters, and this develops into a crisis when they start arguing, and into a catastrophe when the young Boy threatens to kill the Old Man. The climax arrives with a sudden twist, a peripeteia: instead of the young Boy killing his father, it is the Old Man who kills again, this time his son. This is because of his hamartia: he is tragically mistaken, because he thinks God will like his sacrificial offering and will deliver his mother’s soul from Purgatory. He has too much human pride, hybris in himself, and he thinks that as a human being he will be capable of manipulating God in his decisions. Through a sudden realization, in his anagnorisis in the falling action, he realizes that he was wrong, and he has murdered his son in vain, he had become twice a murderer, but has not achieved his aim.