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    A Study Guide for Eugene Ionesco's "The Killer"
    A Study Guide for Eugene Ionesco's "The Killer"
    A Study Guide for Eugene Ionesco's "The Killer"
    Ebook54 pages42 minutes

    A Study Guide for Eugene Ionesco's "The Killer"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Eugene Ionesco's "The Killer", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateMay 15, 2018
    ISBN9781410393333
    A Study Guide for Eugene Ionesco's "The Killer"

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      A Study Guide for Eugene Ionesco's "The Killer" - Gale

      18

      The Killer

      Eugène Ionesco

      1958

      Introduction

      The Killer is one of Eugène Ionesco's most ambitious and successful plays. It is the first of four plays in which Bérenger is a major character, including Rhinoceros (1959), Exit the King (1962), and A Stroll in the Air (1963). These are sometimes known as the Bérenger plays. Ionesco wrote in French, and the French title is Tueur sans gages, which directly translates to Killer without payment. A tueur à gages is the equivalent of a hit man in English, someone who kills for money. To kill for money is at least to have a reason, but to kill without payment, for no reward and perhaps no reason at all, is an even more frightening prospect.

      The play is only Ionesco's second written with a traditional three-act structure, as his artistic project was to experiment not only with the subject of drama but with the form of the genre as well. Ionesco sought to bring high and low theater together and, as his obituary in the New York Times noted, Ionesco was inspired by silent film clowns and vaudeville, elements he folded into to his plays in order to attack the most serious subjects: blind conformity and totalitarianism, despair and death. For theatergoers used to an evening of light entertainment or even for those who expected the inspirational drama of tragedy, Ionesco's mixing of genres could prove a challenge.

      The Killers explores this territory where drama and comedy overlap, in large part by overturning our expectations of what is a serious topic of drama. The murders take place offstage, and no one except the main character, Bérenger, seems particularly upset by them. The structure of the play is in many ways like a typical mystery: there is a murderer and a protagonist determined to identify that murderer. But Ionesco turns this classic quest for an external source of evil inside out, asking us to consider the ways in which we are all, as a society, complicit in violence.

      Author Biography

      Ionesco Was Born In Slatina, Romania, On November 26, 1909, Although He Later Claimed To Have Been Born In 1912. He Died In Paris On March 28, 1994. His Father Was Romanian, And His Mother Was French, And Shortly After His Birth They Moved To Paris. French Was His First Language, And He Did Not Learn Romanian Until The Family Moved Back There When He Was Thirteen. Ionesco Felt That France Was Always His True Home. Martin Esslin, In His Seminal Book The Theater Of The Absurd, quotes an interview Ionesco gave to the Nouvelle Revue Français in which he reflected on the effect on his work of the longrunning classic Punch and Judy show in the Luxembourg Gardens. It was the spectacle of the world itself, which … presented itself to me in an infinitely simplified and caricatured form, as if to underline its grotesque and brutal truth. In his early teens his parents divorced, and Ionesco had to move back to Romania. He went to high school and university there, and in 1936 he married Rodica Burileanu. In 1939 Ionesco returned to France to complete his PhD work in French literature, and he remained there for the rest of his life. His only child, a daughter, Marie-France, was born in 1944.

      Ionesco's first play was The Bald Soprano, written in 1950 when he was struck by the banality of the dialogue in his English language textbook. After The Bald Soprano,

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