The Absurdity of Life

Inspired by Hindu and Buddhist ideas, Strindberg is either suggesting that life is a dream or he is simply using the "seemingly logical structure of the dream" (from his forward) to illustrate how life is also "seemingly logical." In other words, dreams are often illogical and nonlinear. They are hard to make sense of. This is how life is presented in this play. So, one theme connected to the absurdity of life is how difficult it is to make sense of things. Take the Officer for example—he continually searches and longs for romantic love to solve all of his problems. Time and time again, he is let down. But he maintains his search. He maintains this belief even though he has been proven wrong so many times. This is absurd, and he fails to truly gain a grasp on the ways of the world. He is disappointed continually whilst believing that is what life is about.

Existentialism and Meaninglessness

With dreams, anything can happen, and events are not subject to any certain order. Rather than spell out meaning in a logical order, the dream is something that needs to be decoded. There is no central idea, philosophy, or way of life that is clear and obvious. The mystery of the changing cloverleaf door symbolizes this frustration. The characters wait and wait. Surely, there must be some universal idea that explains life and the universe. But in the end, the door is opened and nothing is there. Even the elitist academics (philosophy, medicine, jurisprudence, and theology) arrogantly fail to explain the nothingness. Here, the theme of meaninglessness emerges. One can interpret this in a number of ways. Given the themes of absurdity and meaninglessness, existentialism comes to mind. This ethos suggests that there is no inherent meaning in the world (already there from God, nature, etc.); rather, humans should create their own meaning—as daunting as that might be.

The Role of Duality

Consider that the Officer suffers like an ascetic waiting for his Victoria. His suffering is virtuous in strands of Buddhist thought, but what is the point of life if he never gets to enjoy love? He tries to make meaning in his waiting but ends up miserable. With each character, misery and happiness go hand in hand. Edith plays beautiful music but no one dances with her. For the Mother (early in the play), her children are her joy and sorrow. She raises them and then they leave. Clearly, misery tips the scales in this play and dominates all the characters' lives. Here we have the theme of the binary or duality. Light and dark, love and loss, happiness and misery, joy and sorrow, present and absent: these are all binaries that seem to govern life. Are these primal parts of life or do humans frame their lives in these pairs? Why can't we just be happy and mitigate pain and suffering? Why must opposites always be paired together?

In a diary entry, Strindberg notes:

Am reading about the teachings of the Indian religion. —The whole world purely an illusion.

(The world) is a vision seen in a dream . . . a phantom whose destruction is the task of asceticism. But that task is at odds with the urge to love, and the final result is an incessant penitential torment! — That seems to be the solution to the riddle of the world!

Here, he articulates the frustration of life—how to be virtuous and passionate, or how to indulge and to restrain. One of the refrains in the play is that humans "are to be pitied" because they must endure these paradoxes in seemingly every aspect of life. How can they know what to choose when there is no guiding light behind the door? This is what Agnes learns and promises to report when she ascends back to heaven.