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:
“To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body—both go together, they can’t be separated.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)
“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)
“Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)