Chicken Soup with Barley

by Arnold Wesker

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Community and Purpose

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Throughout the play, we see various iterations of community, such as the nuclear family (Harry, Sarah, Ada, Ronnie), and the lines of the family blur, including friends like Monty, Prince, and Dave. Sarah tries to maintain this community, always bringing them together through offers of food and tea. As the play progresses, fewer and fewer people take her up on these offers, and by the end of the play, Harry expresses that they do not even know their neighbors.

The closer this community is together, the more purpose they seem to have. At the beginning of the play, for instance, they are all clearly fighting toward a common goal: stopping a fascist march. Here, family/community exists in a reciprocal relationship with purpose. Purpose brings people together, but as these people remain together, they continue to find purpose. The first significant rift we see in the family is at the end of Act 1 when Sarah and Harry fight. The rest of the family’s friends leave, knowing that a fight is soon to come, but perhaps more importantly, Sarah seems to lose sight of any purpose she has felt before the fight.

We might say that Harry represents no purpose. Especially by the end of the play, he simply exists. The more Sarah interacts with Harry, the more she seems removed from her own purposes. It is revealed at the end of the play that Sarah feels she has constantly been in a battle with Harry because of this purposelessness. Throughout the play, as characters lose sight of a common goal or purpose, their community becomes increasingly disintegrated.

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