Style
Caryl Churchill’s main concerns when writing this play was the idea of self. She takes this idea of identity and challenges it with this story. If you were to find out that you were simply a clone then you’re not a unique person, but one of many, just a number. This story from a subjective position, though we are privy to most of what is going on, we are always with Salter. So when Bernard (B1) was with Bernard (B2) we did not know what was happening. The world of the play is moderately comprehensible, we can understand everything that happens but some things elude us. Why are the clones so drastically different from one another? The events of the play happen in a fairly linear manner, there are some events in the past that are brought up through conversation, but we are not taken back. The characters are “fully textured human beings, with ideas, feelings, personalities, passions, and foibles” that are very similar to our own, making the characters very lifelike. The setting is set to imitate real life, simply two chairs and perhaps a table. The play is representational, the audience is never interacting with the play itself, only observing.
Read more about this topic: A Number
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)