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The Works of Bertolt Brecht

of Grusha's fate is also the fate of the dispute over the collective farm that putatively forms the occasion for presentation of the fable. Good Woman of Setzuan reaches into the depths of human experience of the moral (or more exactly immoral) universe by illustrating the impotence of divine intervention and the persistent mean-spiritedness of human interaction and enterprise; it is very clear at the end of the play that Shen-Te will be eaten alive, both loved and despised for her desperate goodness, fearful of being victimized by those whom she does not love and by Sun, whom she does love. She is a character who embodies the paradox of the human experience of the consequences of behaving with decency. Galileo is replete with the concerns of an allegedly Great Mind, but Brecht explores the irony of greatness, for his Galileo is equally concerned about the uses to which science is put and whether he will be the Great Man to get credit for inventing the telescope.

The significance of suggesting Brecht's programmatically ironic, paradoxical approach to character and story lies in the fact that the basis for the attitudes the characters enact reaches beyond individual psychology, through the enactment of such psychology and toward the inevitability of confrontation and interaction of the ideas individuals hold of what properly constitutes the human community on one hand, and of themselves as members of that community on the other. Brecht elaborates this idea in a discussion of character as an adumbration, not determinant, of dramatic structure.

There are writers who simply set down what happened. I'm one of them. My material is intelligible; I don't first have to make it so. There are other writers who not only put down what happened but give a theoretical explanation as a separate element. And then there is a third way of going about things, which aims at the mutual fusion of live material and conceptual analysis. To my m...

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The Works of Bertolt Brecht. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:04, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1705041.html