Agony of Being and its linguistic representation in Eugene Ionesco’s Dramatic oeuvre

In his dramatic works, with the purpose of staging the void within mankind and the annihilation of his being, Eugène Ionesco chooses a language which is able to depict defeat in words and in the heart of human life. In fact, Ionesco approaches language through a different perspective and through pinpointing the insufficiencies of language to establish the ground for its deterioration in reader’s mind, destabilizing the equilibrium between language and thought. Through establishing the void and showing both human being and words as disjointed, Ionesco releases his characters in a meaningless world, leaving them without a haven or a shelter. Building on such an approach to Ionesco’s dramatic works, in the present article we will attempt to study the annihilation of human being in the world of sound and fury through analyzing the dissolution of language. To this purpose, we will make use of Arnaud Rykner’s views regarding nouveau theatre as well as some of Ionesco’s dramatic pieces.