SOURCE: "Death and Tragi-Comedy," in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. VI, No. 2, Winter-Spring, 1965, pp. 381-402.

In the following essay, Lamont considers representative plays by Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jack Richardson in order to examine the modern dramatist's comic interpretation of human suffering and death.

There is no solution to the unbearable, and the new theatre attempts to offer no solutions. It is concerned with scrutinizing man exposed to what George Steiner calls "the murderousness and caprice of the inhuman."¹ The most unavoidable truth of all is that of man's mortality. Death, one's own and that of those we love, is the central preoccupation of our contemporary dramatists.

Pierre Aimé Touchard, a former Administrateur of the Comédie Française, and a close friend of Ionesco, defines the tragic climate as one in which "men recognize themselves . . . recognize themselves in others . . . recognize one another . . . come to full consciousness...