Style
Le Malentendu “is austere in its plot and characterization and claustrophobic in mood”.
Camus “deliberately contrived an effect of polished, articulate, non-colloquial discourse”, as in a classical tragedy. Through the necessity of writing while under occupation, “the play is cloaked in metaphor, trailing a train of symbols, with Camus styling the drama with all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. In the Greek style, each character gives the argument for his or her actions, whether for good or ill. Thus Camus is able to air his thoughts on innocence, grief, guilt, betrayal, punishment, integrity, and silence, wrapping all these in what is essentially an existential debate. Although Camus' arguments come thick and fast, the play moves at a deliberate pace as it develops into more of a treatise than an organic drama".
“It is the most poetic of all the works Camus wrote for the stage, but one cannot claim that speech and situation always match perfectly”.
The characters “unwittingly express ambiguities that escape their awareness”, and indirectly express philosophical ideas. Le Malentendu is “so heavily laden with ambiguities and multiple levels of meaning that it borders on caricature, a fact that may explain its relative failure as a tragedy”.
Read more about this topic: The Misunderstanding
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“The old saying of Buffon’s that style is the man himself is as near the truth as we can get—but then most men mistake grammar for style, as they mistake correct spelling for words or schooling for education.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behoves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style c’est l’homme, what is likely to happen if l’homme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual?”
—Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944)