With a sophisticated yet obviously distinguishable flavor of absurd, the play Woyzeck by Georg Büchner features a deeply philosophical worldview of the man that was openly rejected by the society. Franz Woyzcek, apart from being the main character and driving force of the plot of the play, stands out to symbolize controversy and peculiarity of human nature, which is most vividly embodied in his unstable psychic condition and stormy social behavior. On the whole, the play is given the perspective of depicting Woyzeck’s social and family life, with each of the scenes contributing to the thematic growth of the figure of Woyzeck. At the same time, some scenes play an instrumental part in revealing the true essence of Woyzeck as the character with the alienated vision of the world. In this light, Scene XXI bears particular significance, as it aims at exposing the implicit edges of Woyzeck’s personality through the lens of fairy-tale-like type of narration.
At first glance, the scene doesn’t seem to be any different from other ones as all of them appear to be independent in terms of overall sense, partly sharing the main idea of the play. A closer look, however, makes the reader comprehend two important points that the scene features, i.e. the first one being a stark contrast between the jolly song and the macabre fairy tale and the second – allusion of Woyzeck conjured up by Grandmother’s disheartening story. While the logical flow of thought is hardly palpable in the scene, it is still considered parallel to the play’s preposterous flow of sense, which results in the reader’s intuitive sense construction and reliance on the subjective perception of the play. What is more, the way of thinking aptly follows the absurdist line, transforming major sense elements into minor ones.
The first point worth attention is a jolly song sung by girls, Marie’s friends, at the front door. First and foremost, the song stands in contrast to the gloomy and perplexing tone of narration of the play, which at times leaves the reader confused with the story being unfolded. Secondly, the song about pipers and fiddlers dancing in the fields emphasizes Mary’s immersion in her own thoughts and her pessimistic frame of mind. Thirdly, the song seems to initiate sense disagreement with the following story that evokes somber and distressing feelings of disappointment and loss of one’s life path. As girls are singing about Candlemas, a religious holiday and succeeding celebration of it, Marie is thinking of the affair with Drum Major and is overwhelmed with the feelings of guilt and shame. Her disinterest in singing and disregard for girls’ fun are marked by brisk responses that she couldn’t sing (“Marie, sing for us. – I can’t”) and she was not in the mood to explain why (“Why not? – Because”) (Büchner 128). Thus, the described fragment of the scene dwells upon the idea of contrast that pierces through the whole play and is manifested in Woyzeck’s abnormal social and psychic behavior as compared to others. However, this time it’s Mary who feels totally estranged; thinking about the future of herself and her family, she is not grasped by merry and cheerful atmosphere and doesn’t let anyone in her private contemplation.
The story about “poor little boy who had no father or mother” told by Grandmother is even more interesting in the light of the scene as well as the whole play (Büchner 128). As Mary was reluctant to join girls in their singing, one of them asked Grandmother to tell them a story to, most probably, divert their attention from Mary’s low spirits. However, the story manages to introduce an even more oppressive atmosphere that eventually erases the previous joy and inflicts ultimate doom and brooding on the listeners and readers. As the story told by Grandmother progresses, it becomes more and more apparent that the boy who was all alone “in the whole wide world” where “everything was dead” and “there was nobody left on earth” inevitably resembles Woyzeck, a man with no future and no hope to find his place in the society (Büchner 128). Basically the fairy tale is grounded on a strong metaphor which can only be disambiguated if referred to the thematic wholeness of the play. The metaphor stands for the idea of death which is used to describe the surroundings of the world that the boy lived in. When projecting the idea of death onto the character of Woyzeck, it becomes clear that he was experiencing the same kind of problem, i.e. he secretly considered everybody around him dead. Although this idea is not explicitly expressed in the play, the reader comes to such an interpretation of Woyzeck’s pointless roaming here and there and his preoccupation with bizarre dreams and visions.
Furthermore, the boy from the story faces great disappointment at the end of his journey to heaven since heavenly bodies that appeared to be kind and appealing turned out to be completely decayed and infested. Indeed, the moon was an ugly “piece of rotten wood”, the sun “a withered sunflower” and the stars “little golden gnats that a shrike had stuck on a blackthorn” (Büchner 128). As the boy had nowhere else to go, he realized that loneliness had an even tighter grip on him and all his endeavors to search for a companion were in vain. It can hardly be denied that the feelings of utter frustration and grief are applicable to Woyzeck, who was deeply wounded by his wife’s infidelity and hurt by ironic pranks of other people. Woyzeck was also trying to find the person who would understand him, but his attempts were not successful. Thus, the story about the boy is the story about Franz Woyzeck who suffered from being alive in the world of the dead.
In conclusion, Woyzeck by Georg Büchner makes use of the literary veil of absurd to put forward crucial ideas of moral values, human understanding and mutual support, social discrimination of people that don’t fit in, crime and the feeling of hopelessness that leads to it. Although Scene XXI doesn’t really seem to stand out, it still bears the mark of significance that determines overall sense value of the play. Woyzeck perplexes, stuns and befuddles; it is filled with the spirit of despair but steers the reader to a more inspiring life path.
Works Cited
Büchner, Georg. “Woyzeck”. Danton’s Death, Leonce and Lena, and Woyzeck: Oxford World’s Classics. Trans. Victor Price. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 105-132. Print.
