The plotting Guelleners catch up to him and, while stating that they are all for his trip and will not stop him, surround him and prevent Ill from boarding the train. Their menacing moblike demeanor is exacerbated by their newfound speech habits. Ill comments that he wrote to the Chief Constable of Kaffigen but his letter was clearly not delivered.
No one. Help me. Nobody has blinded me. Similarly, niemand wants to kill Ill; meaning, everyone wants to kill him. With the Last Judgment. It puts absolutely everything — faith, hope, charity, philosophical knowledge and insight — everything below the level of love and states that without love, none of these things have value. It is both chastening for philosophers, theologians, and the like, and undoubtedly true.
Girard points out that narratives can be divided into the sacrificial and the revelatory. Thomas F. Bertonneau adds to this that there are scapegoats in films and plays, and the scapegoats of the film or play. In sacrificial stories, the bad guy scapegoats the good guy, and we, the audience, hate him for it. But, this turns the bad guy into our scapegoat. We, the audience, bond in shared hatred and look forward to his punishment. Death or exile. To do that, he explicitly writes that he wishes the Guelleners not to be presented as entirely unsympathetic.
If they are, then the audience can simply write them off as evil people and they become the scapegoat of the play, just as Ill is the scapegoat in the play. They must not, emphatically not, be portrayed as wicked. This direction is somewhat fraught, because they are in fact being evil — it is just an evil in which we all participate, and their manner of speaking in self-righteous tones, while planning murder, provides an extra-dimension of moral revoltingness.
They like to mind-read, engage in Catchs, and invoke psychological diagnoses in their interactions with Ill. This is also mind-reading; I know the real reason for your request, whatever you might say. But by virtue of this very fact, they unconsciously imitate and repeat the acts of their fathers. To simply condemn them as wicked is likely to continue to blind us to the tendency to scapegoat endemic to all human culture, and most specifically, to us personally.
Ill goes to see the Priest in The Visit when he realizes that the Guelleners buying on credit means they will need to kill him to pay their debts. Because you once betrayed a young girl for money, many years ago, do you believe the people will betray you now for money? You impute your own nature to others. All too naturally. The cause of our fear and our sin lies in our own hearts.
By being the first to accuse Ill of projecting, the Priest appears to hope to avoid also being accused of projecting his guilt for scapegoating Ill onto Ill himself. This situation actually occurred, and the job applicant was vetoed by him.
Or, someone on a college promotion committee might object that the candidate has published in no reputable venues, precisely because this is his situation and he has not forgotten it. This tenured person had published in a vanity press only. These people were keen to persecute others precisely because these others suffered from the same defect. These defects are wounds which make us particularly sensitive to them.
It is only if this is not understood that this behavior seems bizarre. If Ill accuses the Priest of projecting in turn, Ill is more likely to seem to be trying to deflect attention from himself. We see here what appears to be a cynical abuse of insights that should be illuminating, but are instead used to disguise and misdirect.
The Mayor projects when he accuses Ill of nihilism, losing faith in the community, and rejecting the rule of law. The Priest betrays his own bad conscience shortly after this speech, when he begs Ill to flee.
The contrast between how the Guelleners should be acting within a genuine Christian context, and their actual behavior, can be seen in the mock prayer at the end of the Golden Apostle Hotel assembly attended by reporters. The scene in the Golden Apostle also has overtones of the visit by the Red Cross to Theresienstadt concentration camp in the nineteen forties.
Similar audacity is displayed when the fictional Guelleners invite journalists to the Golden Apostle to film the final decision to illegally execute Ill. This repetition evokes the Red Cross and the Guellen journalists repeating what they have been told to think.
We are lead away from taking the prayer simply at face value because the content of the prayer is so outrageous. Now the Wood is more of a symbol for the death of love and is especially associated with Claire since she now owns it. Sacked by the Huns. The contrast between the way Claire and Ill used to meet and their current maudlin association highlights the way in which the death of love has inexorably led to the victimization of Ill the scapegoat. His lies and betrayal of Claire forty-five years ago are responsible for a great deal of harm to her and now, indirectly, to the economic well-being of the town.
Of course, the town of Guellen participated in the victimization of Claire, leading to her leaving Guellen. That is why all scapegoat victims are innocent of what they are accused. They cannot do much harm in isolation.
The Guelleners are almost as guilty as Ill for the mistreatment of Claire. The town is in debt and this link between guilt and debt seems to be linked to the similarity between the German words for debt schulden , and schuld, which means guilt. The town failed to deliver justice in court, and jeered at her status as a supposedly promiscuous woman, forcing her into prostitution.
Ill achieves a certain moral status by accepting his guilt and makes peace with his unavoidable murder by coming to view it as retribution for his sins. The Guelleners do no such thing. It should be noted, however, that it is common for scapegoats to at least begin to agree with their persecutors.
Bullies can be quite good at getting their victims to feel bad about themselves — assuming the negative opinion that the bullies have of them. There are plenty of psychological experiments proving the extreme difficulty of challenging absolute unanimity on the part of others. Karl, Ill's son, makes a wrong turn; to get back to town, they must drive through Konrad's Village Wood.
In the forest, the four townsmen turn into trees, emphasizing the autumn season. Ill notes that "the leaves on the ground are like layers of gold" The family decides to go see a film, but Ill says that he'll stay behind and walk back into town for the meeting. She is now the owner of the wood, and tells Ill that she has sent the two eunuchs to Hong Kong to visit an opium den.
Claire asks her new husband to leave them alone for a while, and Ill and Claire walk together, reminiscing about the times that they spent in the wood, smoking together, deeply in love.
Ill asks Claire about the child that she had claimed was his, and Claire says that it was a black-haired girl, whom she named Genevieve.
Claire tells Ill that the girl's eyes never opened, and that she died of meningitis a year after she was born. Claire then asks Ill to talk to her about how she was when she was seventeen, when he loved her.
Instead, Ill tells her that he accepts whatever punishment she has in store for him: "I only know that my meaningless life will end" Claire says that she will take him to Capri in the coffin that she brought with her, and place his body in a mausoleum overlooking the Mediterranean.
He asks her to describe the location to him. She does, and then says: "You will remain there. A dead man beside a stone idol. Your love died many years ago. But my love could not die. Neither could it live. It grew into an evil thing, like me, like the pallid mushrooms in this wood, and the blind, twisted features of the roots, all overgrown by my golden millions. Their tentacles sought you out, to take your life, because your life belonged to me, forever.
You are in their toils now, and you are lost. You will soon be no more than a dead love in my memory, a gentle ghost haunting the wreckage of a house" When Claire finishes speaking, Ill leaves. The scene then shifts to the town meeting in the auditorium of the Golden Apostle, where the press has gathered for the event. An awestruck radio commentator narrates the events that are transpiring. First, the Mayor announces that Claire has offered to donate one million pounds, half for the town and half to be shared by the families.
The Schoolmaster then asks, "What is her aim? Is it her aim to make us happy with money? Her aim is to have the spirit of this community transformed - transformed to the spirit of justice. We, staggered by this demand, ask: have we not always been a just community? The townspeople respond to this by stating that a crime has been committed - perjury - and that they plan to rectify the situation. The Mayor calls Ill forward, and declares that it is because of him that they are receiving such a generous gift.
He asks Ill whether he will accept the gift or refuse it, and Ill answers that he will respect whatever decision is made. The Mayor asks the assembled people whether there are any questions. Representatives from the Church, the medical community, the police force, and the opposition party are all silent.
There is a vote to accept Claire's gift - unanimous save for Ill. The Mayor then leads the citizens in an almost religious chant, stating that they accept the money not for the sake of wealth, but in the name of justice. Ill screams, "My God! The cameraman asks the assembled townspeople whether they can repeat everything that they have just done, because the news-reel is jammed. The town repeats the chant, but Ill does not repeat his "cry of joy" for the camera.
The Mayor then urges the press to enjoy the refreshments in the restaurant. Ill is asked to remain, and the townspeople lock the doors of the auditorium and turn out the lights.
The Priest crosses to Ill slowly, watching as he takes a last smoke. Ill turns to accept his judgment, and the townspeople kill him. A reporter appears just as the Doctor declares that Ill has died from a heart attack. The Mayor adds, "Died of joy," and the reporter declares that "Life writes the most beautiful stories" Claire arrives to examine the corpse, and sees in Ill's face the boy that she had known in her youth: a "black panther.
As Claire exits, the town's wealth grows at a dazzling pace. Suddenly, everyone is wearing evening gowns and dress-suits. In the style of a Greek tragedy, the townspeople form into two choruses and begin chanting. The play concludes at the railway station, where Claire waits.
She is accompanied by Ill's coffin, which the townspeople refer to as a "precious charge" Act 3 brings the drama to its logical conclusion. When the Schoolteacher and the Doctor realize that Claire has been the one orchestrating Guellen's rapid decline, and that she is doing so in order to punish the town for Ill's mistreatment of her, the townspeople begin to rationalize murdering the man whom they had previously held in such high esteem.
In other words, they figure out a way to justify his murder: slaughtering Ill, they decide, is the only proper punishment for a man who is guilty of a grave injustice against a woman, an injustice that has caused an untold amount of suffering.
In the first act, the townspeople had viewed Claire's proposition in a negative light, believing that it was a simple exchange of a life for wealth and prosperity, but in this act the townspeople begin to believe that it is a matter of justice, not a matter of material wealth. The audience, however, realizes that the townspeople are simply fooling themselves: although they have declared Ill's death "just" in order to validate their actions, it is clear that they have decided that the material comfort of many justifies the sacrifice of a single life.
Act 3 reveals that Claire's power and wealth do indeed, as she has claimed, entitle her to alter the very foundation of the legal system. The audience has seen her "buying" justice several times throughout the play such as when she pulls the emergency brake on the express train and escapes punishment , but it is only here that the true scope of her power is revealed.
She is even able to sway officers of the law to abandon their posts: the Policeman flat-out refuses to arrest Claire on Ill's behalf, thereby directly contributing to his death. Even though the audience learned from the Priest that there is no death penalty in Switzerland, Claire's power is so all-encompassing that she is able to make her gift conditional upon a total overhaul of the legal system.
The entire town becomes complicit in an extra-judicial proceeding; an extreme punishment that is meted out in blatant disregard of the established legal system. Additionally, Claire's unique rule of law is driven by a "personal" sense of justice based on revenge; indeed, throughout the play Claire repeatedly appears to confuse "justice" with "revenge".
She announces to the Schoolteacher and the Doctor that the world has turned her into a whore, and that she, in turn, intends to turn the world into a brothel. Motivated by the maxim of "an eye for an eye," Claire views justice as a kind of personal service that can be purchased as easily as a pair of shoes.
The allusions to sexual services "whore", "brothel" are direct references to Claire's personal history: she has suffered because the fact that she gave birth to a child out of wedlock and then became a prostitute has rendered her unsuitable for inclusion in "normal" society.
Her clients, however, were free to satisfy their own desires - however "perverse" they might have been - because their wealth gave them the ability to do as they pleased. Even her first husband, from whom she inherited her wealth, was rich enough to purchase a beautiful young wife even though he was old and decrepit.
Claire's real-world education proved to her that anything can be bought: marriage, justice or revenge , personal services, and life itself. Theme Wheel. Everything you need for every book you read. The way the content is organized and presented is seamlessly smooth, innovative, and comprehensive. LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Visit , which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The barn is strewn with enormous spiderwebs, and apparently is so dark that the Doctor and Teacher , who have come to visit Claire, struggle to find her.
The act opens on Claire looking every bit the part of a master manipulator: she sits literally and metaphorically at the dark center of a web, waiting for prey i. Her calculated lack of regard for others is only emphasized by the apparent ease with which she discards her new husband. Active Themes. Love and Prostitution. It would be a win-win situation. Justice, Morality, and Money. Now, she reminds the men, she is in control and she wants Ill dead.
Related Quotes with Explanations. The once dingy and dated shop is now immaculate and it has updated its stock, sign, and counter. We learn from Mrs. Ill that her husband has cloistered himself above his shop, and has been nervously pacing the floor for several days. This shows just how deeply justice can be bought. Not only are the townspeople ultimately willing to kill Ill for money, but they are also willing to assume a moral posture that justifies their act and vindicates Claire for her cruel directive.
Irony and Artifice. The Teacher enters the shop and begins to drink heavily. The other customers in the shop decline to join him—or to drink at all—until the journalists have left town. They continue to make purchases and strategize avoiding the press, briefly pausing only to condemn the extravagance of the chocolate-eating women from Act II when they walk by in expensive clothing. In an interesting reversal, they disparage the women who themselves criticized Miss Louise in Act II.
The villagers respond with calculated enthusiasm, being sure not to say anything negative about Claire. But they are thrown off when the journalists begin to ask Mrs. Ill about the love triangle involving her, Ill , and Claire forty-five years ago. She is relieved to find that the journalists think Ill left Claire not because she was poor and pregnant, but because he fell in love with someone else i.
The journalists copy the maxim into their notes. Her claims that she and Ill married for love rather than for money are not true: the audience knows that Ill married her as a means of insuring his own financial stability, and that Mrs.
However, the fact that Mrs.
0コメント