The Ghost Sonata Essay

In August Strindberg’s play, The Ghost Sonata, I found it to be very unusual, leaving me wondering if any of the characters were real or imaginary. The setting of The Ghost Sonata takes place in a Swedish town where there is a multiple story apartment building as the backdrop. The occupants of the apartment building live according to class, meaning those considered as the upper class live on the top floor, the middle class live on the ground floor, the lower class live below, and the poor are found outside of the apartment building just hanging about. There is a young student named Arkenholz who is mesmerized by the apartment building and those who live there. He stands outside the building looking in on the people who live there and he …show more content…
The old man assures the student that he was not responsible for this fathers shortcomings and the old man offers a job to the student. The old man tells the student, “If you obey me, you’ll fare very nicely”. The old man wants the student to attend the showing of The Valkyrie at the matinee, and tells him by doing so, he will gain access into the colonels home. In the colonels home lives the colonel, the colonels’ daughter (which the student has his eyes on), and the colonels’ wife who is a mummy that lives in the closet making parrot noises. The old man believes that he can gain access into the colonels’ home with the help of the student. The old man wants to see the colonel to collect on his debts, which he does by humiliating the colonel and stripping him of his title. The student learns that the colonel’s daughter is also a troubled soul, and that the cook tortures her, for all her wrong doings. The student tells the colonels daughter to get rid of the cook, but she is unable to because the cook appears to be some sort of bad spirit that will not leave the daughter until her