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Abstract
This dissertation pivots on investigating the theme of the alienated self
in the drama of Brian Friel, one of the most distinguished contemporary
dramatists in Ireland. In his plays, the alienation of the Irish self represents a
central, recurrent theme to its expression all the different dramatic elements
in his plays are devoted. The theoretical part of the study concentrates on the
special nature of man as distinct from the nature of the other species. Central
to this nature is the concept of the human needs, such as the needs for love,
belongingness, social involvement, and political participation, as utterly
different from the instinctive animal needs, such as the needs for food, drink,
and the like.
The researcher’s line of argument is that alienation ensues from man’s
failure to satisfy his human needs in a gratifying way that conforms to his
human nature. Against this premise the drama of Brian Friel is read with the
aim of understanding the main causes and symptoms of alienation in the
Irish society and the possible remedies suggested by the writer. The
researcher hypothesizes that the major cause of the alienation of the Frielian
characters is their inability to satisfy their basic human needs because of the
different limitations of their Irish context. Most prominent of such
limitations are the division of ancient Ireland into two separate, rather
fighting, states, the urbanization of the Irish society and the demise of old
rural Ireland, and the British Imperialism with its strategies to eradicate the
Irish culture and blur the Irish language. Additionally, the poverty,
dispossession, and deprivation of the characters represent distinctive causes
of their alienation. All such causes generate, in turn, different symptoms of
alienation from which the characters suffer: unhappiness, depression,
despair, powerlessness, self-fragmentation, social isolation, and cultural
estrangement.
B
The present dissertation verifies the former pivotal hypothesis via two
complementary procedures. First, the researcher traces the different sociopsychological
and philosophical meanings of “alienation,” both as a concept
and a phenomenon, with the aim of arriving at a working definition that can
be adopted throughout the practical part of the thesis. Second, three of Brian
Friel’s plays – Philadelphia, Here I Come (1964), The Freedom of the City
(1973), and Translations (1980) – are closely analyzed and interpreted in the
light of the working definition arrived at in the theoretical part. The aim is to
critically explore the distinctive way in which Friel has dramatized the
theme of “the alienated self” on three major levels, familial, political, and
cultural, which the three plays represent respectively, and how alienation, on
these three levels, is considered the natural outcome of the failure of the
Frielian characters to satisfy their human needs in the course of their
involvement in and reaction to the social, political, and cultural forces
around them.