Last Updated on June 19, 2019, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 480

French-Romanian poet Eugène Ionesco’s play, Exit the King (le roi se muert), written in 1962, is an absurdist play. The play treats the demise of an aging king who believes he can control the natural forces of the universe, including his own demise. Existentialism suggests that the king actually does control reality as he perceives it.

He built the first airplane with his own hands. At first it didn’t work—all the test pilots, Icarus and the others, fell into the sea—but then he decided to pilot the plane himself. I was his mechanic. Long before that, when he was just a little prince, he invented the wheelbarrow. I played with him. Then it was sailboats, steamships, the railway, the automobile. And of course the sickle and the plough, the combine and the tractor.

All I’ve ever wanted is to be remembered by everyone until the end of time and then also after the end of time – in twenty thousand years, in two hundred and fifty five thousand billion years... but they’ll forget long before that, they’re all selfish. Just thinking about their own little lives.