Comparing Ritual in Beckett, Hemingway, and ONeill :: comparison compare contrast essays

Ritual in Beckett, Hemingway, and ONeill perhaps the public psyche has simply been overloaded and, like an electrical circuit, has pursy its fuse and g unrivaled cold under the weight of too umteen impulses (Miller, lvi). The juvenile world is often looked upon as a cold and hardhearted one. And the modern existence is such that it has been called a Wasteland by T. S. Eliot. It has in like art objectner led Camus to parallel it with the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus, who was condemned to repeatedly travail a boulder up a mountain, after which it would roll stamp out the other side, and he would have to start all over again. It is this riteistic bearing which has become a significant factor in modern life. Although ritualism is a common theme in modern literature, its function had been construe differently by modern printrs. Many, like Beckett and Hemingway, see ritualistic behavior almost as a form of therapy, a healing effect used to cope with internal turmoil. Others, chiefly expressionists like ONeill, look upon ritual with abhor. They see it as the deadening of society, the mechanization of humanity. Expressionist drama protested potently against the system of industrialized production that transformed man into an automaton (Glicksberg 51).ONeills scorn of ritualism, which is typical of the expressionists, is evident in his plays. The expressionists believed that humanity is out of kilter with nature, and mans obsession with materialism and machines is a factor in the deadening of the soul. ONeill was a man described by Joseph Golden as being a godless, despondent, pessimistic, antisocial creature who was also prone to such exuberance that he could write to a friend Im tickled to death with life I wouldnt go out and miss the heartsease of the play for anything(31).ONeills lack of belief in religion was a constant quantity struggle for him. He was disturbed not only by the absence seizure of Christianity, but by humanitys inability to find a replacement for it. He described this feeling in a letter to George Jean Nathan when he wrote, The playwright today must dig at the roots of the indisposition of today as he feels it--the death of the Old God and the failure of science and materialism to give any satisfying new one for the surviving primitive religious instinct to find a substance of and to life in, comfort his fears of death with (qtd in Golden 39).