Word: brecht
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Social Chance. Brecht begins where Lear ends: the world is a rack on which mankind is tortured. A character in one of the plays is asked to recite what is called the short catechism-"it'll get worse, it'll get worse, it'll get worse." Starting thus, Brecht might have developed a tragic sense, but he apparently balked at three basic elements of tragedy-the idea of inevitability, human guilt, and the tragic hero. In Brecht's plays, G.O.D. is indeed just a word, and Fate becomes the blind workings of social chance...
...misanthrope, Brecht vented his derisive humor, the black comedy that links his work with Ben Jonson's Volpone and Melville's The Confidence Man. But Brecht sometimes seems to be laughing to keep from crying. As with most cynics, his hard words clustered around a soft core of pity. He was plagued by the defeat of goodness in the world-one of the things Brecht naively expected of Communism was a trade unionism of the good, a method for arming goodness with power-and in the majority of his works he returns to images of goodness and vulnerability...
...Shlink his personal judgment of a book. Shlink decides to buy Garga's soul instead, and a peculiar campaign of mutual self-abasement develops. At first the audience is led to think that Shlink is simply a capitalist villain, but halfway through the play, in an intriguing reversal, Brecht makes clear that Shlink himself is a victim-one whose skin has been so toughened by life that he can no longer feel. In fact, he probably stages his battle with Garga only to see whether any sensation will return...
...Although Brecht almost ritualistically blames environment-the jungle of the modern city-he comes close to making some general, existential points about man, strikingly anticipating Beckett and lonesco: the impossibility of communication and the paralysis of feeling. At the play's violent end, Garga and Shlink face each other with only a numbing sense of apartness to show for their fiercely intimate enmity: "If you crammed a ship full of human bodies till it burst, the loneliness inside it would be so great that they would turn to ice ... so great is our isolation that even conflict is impossible...
Nickelodeon Sentiment. Although In the Swamp is surrealist in technique, with enigmatic central characters who are symbolic rather than human, the minor figures-rogues all-are marvelously funny and thoroughly human. From this point on, Brecht's plays fork in these two directions: the symbolic-didactic and the raffish-human...