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By Root 5602 0

for an author to tell their story. It emerges that they are a father, whose wife has left him and their son to live with another man, with whom she has had three more children. After many years the mother has returned with her children to the city where she previously lived, and has sent her eldest daughter to work in a dress shop, to provide them with money. In reality the shop is the front for a brothel, to which the father comes one day looking for sex. He tries to seduce his own stepdaughter, but in the nick of time is interrupted by the mother, who screams out who he is.

These six characters in fact represent the archetypal family: Father, Mother, Son and Daughter, completed by two versions of the Child, boy and girl, representing the future. But they are divided off from one another by every kind of resentment and unhappiness. Father and mother hate each other. The original son resents his mother for abandoning him. The daughter resents having had to support her family in this degrading way, and in particular her stepfather for the episode where he tried to seduce her. While all this is explained, the two youngest children remain silent.

The `characters' have no other existence than this wretched drama they have all lived through. Frozen in their appointed roles, incapable of developing, they try to explain what has happened to the play's director and his uncomprehending `actors'. When the actors clumsily try to recreate the seduction scene, the characters protest they have got it all wrong. The director then asks them to repeat it in a new setting, the garden of the father's house, where suddenly it seems the `characters' are beginning to break out of their roles. The mother tries to ingratiate herself with the son she had abandoned. He runs away from her to a fountain, where he sees the younger daughter has drowned herself. The younger son then shoots himself. At this shocking irruption of violence, the director no longer knows whether he is watching make-believe or reality, and calls the rehearsal to an end.

Through most of the play it has seemed as if the characters, trapped in their ego-roles, are doomed just to go on re-enacting their story in circular fashion for ever.The only hope of release from this treadmill is for something unexpected and violent to happen, as at the end of a Chekhov play. The two characters who have seemed the most helpless victims of all this misery, and who have remained mute, take the only way out. In reality, of course, nothing has been resolved. But at least, as in Chekhov, the play has been given the semblance of a significant ending.

We see a similar combination of endings in a book published four years later, Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925). As the novel concludes, the narrator is musing on the life of Jay Gatsby, the mysterious multi-millionaire who has recently been murdered. He recalls how Gatsby had emerged from obscure beginnings in the American Middle West, and had come east to build up a great fortune, to live in a fine house and to host fabulous parties. For years Gatsby had pursued the vision of Daisy, the beautiful girl he had lost as a young man. But finally he had caught up with her, living nearby and unhappily married to a husband who was having an affair with the wife of a garage mechanic. Just as it seemed the two might at last be brought happily together, Daisy, driving Gatsby's car, had unavoidably run over and killed her husband's mistress. Daisy's husband had then identified Gatsby to the dead woman's husband as the car's owner. The cuckolded husband, thinking Gatsby was his wife's lover, had gone to Gatsby's house and shot him in his swimming pool, before committing suicide. As the story ends, the narrator looks back over Gatsby's life, and how it had all been the vain pursuit of a dream. Beginning thousands of miles away in his humble childhood home, he had worked up to all the splendour of his wealth (albeit achieved by what turned out to be very dubious methods), his fine house, his famous parties (even though he had scarcely known most of