On The Image Of Death In Sam Reid 's Family Trilogy

The majority of Sam Shepard’s plays establishes a new insight into the social reality in the United States, with his family trilogy, Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, and True West, voicing a variety of constructive opinions on the significance of reality. However, the exploration of reality undergoes a vast alteration from reification to abstraction, finallyfocusing its attention on the interior essence of the reality. The inner part of human beings is in close relation to the unconsciousness and is insensibly suppressed due to the fear of death and taboos. Only in an irrational state, like dreams and intoxication, for instance, can the unconsciousness be fully displayed.Events, characters and things that appear in such an irrational state is defined by Jung as images.Shepard’s family trilogy is replete with death images or images relevant to death which unfold a picture of socialized humans heading for a spiritual wasteland. The family trilogy is intersected by three types of death images, namely, the image of plants, the image of liquor, and the image of violence. The mysterious and religious plants present objectively their states of mind;the liquor liftsan irrational sense to a Dionysian ecstasy to have them recognize the so-called reality; while the violence turns to be an image to reflect the external world.Everyone is disappointed at what they are predetermined, going on suffering the tragic isolation.The death images are the theatrical presentation of the temporal world, revealing the social state of affair and exploring the truth of men. They are not merely images within a play but a manifesto to people in the temporal world, demonstrating that the real men in anxiety and shackles are imitated by the fictional characters, but keep finding a path to free themselves from the spiritual plights.