OCR
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 chaiselounge. 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. + 106 +