One of the most obvious elements that tells us that Happy Days is an Absurd play is one that the audience will be able to pick up on before Winnie even wakes up to say her first line: Winnie lives buried in a mound of dirt. Without any explanation to this otherwise bizarre condition, the audience must accept this irrational universe as the setting of Winnie’s life. And just as you start to think “Well, what kind of life could you live being stuck in a mound of dirt?” you could begin to compare her story to that of Sisyphus in Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus and Camus’s three solutions to finding meaning in life.
Where Sisyphus has his punishment of eternally rolling the stone up the hill just to watch it roll down for him to start the process …show more content…
While it’s impossible to know what Winnie imagines the outcome of her situation is, I believe that she’s trying to avoid the idea that she could end up living in the dirt mound forever. With that as the negated thought, that would leave two different outcomes that she mentions through out the play to be her “leap of faith”. The first one she repeats a few times through out the script is the idea of dying. Although, she only ever mentions Willie dying and the misery she would experience on her own. The more obvious “leap of faith” comes on page 518 where she says, “And that perhaps some day the earth will yield and let me go, the pull so great, yes, crack all around me and let me out” (Happy Days …show more content…
Camus explains Absurd Freedom saying,
To abolish conscious revolt is to elude the problem. The theme of permanent revolution is thus carried into individual experiences. Living is keeping the absurd alive. Keeping it alive is, above all, contemplating it. (Camus, 54)
The pieces that really connected Sisyphus and Winnie’s characters together for me was the final line in The Myth of Sisyphus that reads “One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (Camus, 123). As we know, through out the entire show Winnie says she’s going to have another “happy day”. I believe that both character’s fighting to take control of their emotions when faced in otherwise torturous situations is how they take over their freedoms, and control their lives in what little possible ways they
Where Sisyphus has his punishment of eternally rolling the stone up the hill just to watch it roll down for him to start the process …show more content…
While it’s impossible to know what Winnie imagines the outcome of her situation is, I believe that she’s trying to avoid the idea that she could end up living in the dirt mound forever. With that as the negated thought, that would leave two different outcomes that she mentions through out the play to be her “leap of faith”. The first one she repeats a few times through out the script is the idea of dying. Although, she only ever mentions Willie dying and the misery she would experience on her own. The more obvious “leap of faith” comes on page 518 where she says, “And that perhaps some day the earth will yield and let me go, the pull so great, yes, crack all around me and let me out” (Happy Days …show more content…
Camus explains Absurd Freedom saying,
To abolish conscious revolt is to elude the problem. The theme of permanent revolution is thus carried into individual experiences. Living is keeping the absurd alive. Keeping it alive is, above all, contemplating it. (Camus, 54)
The pieces that really connected Sisyphus and Winnie’s characters together for me was the final line in The Myth of Sisyphus that reads “One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (Camus, 123). As we know, through out the entire show Winnie says she’s going to have another “happy day”. I believe that both character’s fighting to take control of their emotions when faced in otherwise torturous situations is how they take over their freedoms, and control their lives in what little possible ways they