SOURCE: "The Characters: Psychology and Symbols," in The World of Jean Anouilh, University of California Press, 1961, pp. 165-91.

In the excerpt below, Pronko explores Anouilh's technique of characterization, in which he mixes "characters who are often convincingly alive" with those that are symbols or general types.

Serious dramatists of France today, like Sartre, Camus, and Anouilh, seem no longer to regard character as the kernel of the drama. They present not so much a psychological study as they do a picture of man's predicament, in which the personages are representative of various aspects of man and of life itself. This is not to say that these authors are writing allegories in which men are stripped of lifelike qualities and presented only as symbols. But psychology is too abstract, says Sartre. "For us a man is a whole enterprise in himself. And passion is a part of that enterprise...