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CHAPTER Two: WHAT Is A DRAMA EVENT
This sequence of events is structured by the dramatist to make a DE possible.
Throughout the scene Dan struggles to understand his mother’s actions and
his own responsibility. This develops into questions about his mother’s real
identity when he finds out that Richard is his father and that Liz probably
worked as a prostitute. When, as a solution to this desperate situation, Dan
tries to take revenge by blinding Richard, his questions get connected to those
about the story of the blinded child that kept reappearing through the play.
When Dan is tripped over by Richard, he suddenly falls from the blinder’s
position into the place of the one being blinded. The ‘aaaaaooghhghgh’ can
be understood as an act of realisation, which then gets him on his feet, and
changes his complete relation to the moment. There is a clear shift in Dan’s
understanding of his own situation and his relation to the outside world
which is expressed in him going to the window and repeating ‘for the kid’.
The moment is extreme on different levels. On a narrative level the threat to
blind Richard, stretched to its limits in the situation by Dan stomping around,
makes the situation very intense. The story is taken to its most extreme in
Dan’s inarticulate shout while he is lying on the ground as it is a turning
point in the narrative and suddenly changes all the relationships in room,
not only how father and son relate to each other, but also how Dan relates
to his mother and his own past: the focus of his actions move from inside to
the outside.
Dan’s choice in the moment is extreme. His decision to blind Richard
can be seen as a radical choice, but his decision to go to the window and
turn his attention to ‘the kid’ in order to deal with his own situation is even
more extreme. Dan’s action is radical because of its unexpectedness and
unusualness. What he understood about his situation can be interpreted in
many ways, but all those interpretations are juxtaposed with how he tried to
deal with his situation earlier in the scene. Dan’s fundamental human need
is to understand what happened with his mother and what his role was in
it, this is what he asks Richard about while the father is tied to the chaise¬
lounge. Earlier in the scene Dan’s need to restore justice is overwritten by
the urge to take revenge: “Thass why yer come ‘ere! Why yer come in this
room! So I can put the room right! Yer goin t’ lose yer eyes!”.*? The need
for justice being turned into a cause for revenge is often used in ideological
narratives; it is the logic of mobs lynching people, or the death sentence. Dan’s
turn towards the window and his utterance ‘for the kid’ is extreme because it
breaks with this logic and opens a new passage for him. It is the clash between
the ontological need to be able to see one’s own situation and the socially
corrupted response to this need.
122 Tbid., 206.
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