Searching for Identity from Sartre’s Point of View in the Play The Buried Child by Sam Shepard

The purpose of this article “Searching for identity from Sartre’s point of view in the play The Buried Child” is to gain a new understanding of the characters and their world with an analytical look at Sam Shepard’s play based on Sartre’s philosophy. Among Sam Shepard’s plays, The Buried Child deals more with the issue of searching for identity. The conflict of characters, conflict and disagreement between family members and its effects on the society with a focus on the contemporary American man in this play are quite evident. The characters portrayed by Shepard in his plays are almost all chosen from the same gender. And in various works, the amount of their psychological problems and conflicts and physical diseases has increased or decreased. But in the play The Buried Child, we see that the characters are exposed to the audience completely alone and without creating a real relationship with each other and the society, naked and far from each other. For this reason, this article first looks at Sam Shepard’s theater and deals with the relationship between his works and the philosophy of existentialism. In the following, he presents the dramatic narration and analysis of the said work. Then, by examining the issue of searching for identity in the work, the impact of Sartre’s thought on the process of forming actions and the progress of Shepard’s drama is discussed. The main question of the article is, what role does the search for identity play in the creation of the mentioned work? According to this issue, the hypothesis of the influence of character in the design of dramas and its key role in the performance of this work is determined. The result of this research shows the impact of Sartre’s thought that man is condemned to freedom, as well as the moral principles of his philosophy, such as self-alienation and living in wrong intentions, in the characterization of Sam Shepard’s play The Buried Child. Because the search for identity in Sartre’s original thought in Shepard’s works can be recovered in the form of parallelism and the combination of freedom and rebellion alongside each other. This article is written in a descriptive and analytical way, and the methods of collecting and classifying information are done using library studies.