The Killer Themes

The Killer in the title of Eugène Ionesco’s play is death itself. Here death is not ennobling, spiritual, or tragic; its occurrence is as nondescript and arbitrary as the figure of the Killer himself. In the very long monologue which ends the play, Berenger offers dozens of arguments—humanistic, practical, existential—against the activities of the Killer, but comes to admit their futility. He sees, as Ionesco himself put it in his stage directions, “the vacuity of his own rather commonplace morality.”

Death may be mundane, but life is not an attractive alternative. Berenger tells the Architect that he can remember experiencing, when he was young, rare moments of a transcendent rapture of joy and otherness. These moments have gone. The Architect, efficient and bored, only half listens, demonstrating the fact that other people are no help.

Any effort to achieve contact is a failure; when Berenger falls instantly in love with Dany and proclaims his highly romantic passion, she barely notices him. Berenger’s one friend is Édouard, a whining, miserable, self-pitying wretch. In the play there are a few characters who are comic (like the old man searching for the banks of the Danube) or sympathetic (like the young soldier with a bouquet of carnations who is cruelly reprimanded by a policeman). Most people, however, are as choleric as Berenger’s concierge or as hateful as Mother Peep, with her vicious political program, or as...