What's The Goat?

Edward Albee(1928-2016)is one of the most famous playwrights in the history of American drama and the most controversial one as well.His glory is fully evidenced by the awards that he has won,whereas the outlandish characters and the tall tales that he created in his plays are even more eye-catching.As one of the best of Albee's later works,The Goat or,Who Is Sylvia-Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy(2000)demonstrates Albee's skillful writing techniques and the ability of storytelling.To put it simply,The Goat is a play about an extramarital love between a man and his goat.The protagonist Martin's“unreasonable” love towards a goat is beyond explanation,and the explicit bestiality described in this play also frustrates the audience's expectation and causes discomfort for many people.Is Martin's unscrupulous behavior driven by his own desires or the unconscious construction of the Other? Does his wife,Stevie,kill the goat to rebuild a happy family or is she just out to avenge her husband and reshape her subjectivity? In The Goat,the subject's desires and self-identification are constantly constructed in the discourse of self and the Other.Language serves as a tool to enable people communicate with each other,but at the same time,it also keeps people unconsciously trapped in the cage of the signifiers embodied in language itself.The thesis attempts to analyze Albee's The Goat in the following three parts: the introduction,the main body and the conclusion.The first part is a brief introduction about the playwright Edward Albee and his major works,with emphasis on The Goat.Literature review about The Goat and Lacanian psychoanalysis is also given in this part.Then,the author briefly explains the rationality and significance of approaching this play from the perspectives of self and the Other,desire theory,and the imaginary,the symbol and the real order in Lacan's psychoanalytic theories.The second part is the main body of this thesis,and it contains three chapters.Chapter One mainly interprets the image of the goat from different perspectives,especially Lacan's mirror stage theory.Chapter Two introduces the symbolic order in Lacan's psychoanalytic theory,and analyzes how the goat,a silent Other,influences and reshapes the characters in the drama and how it is shaped by different characters from the perspective of Lacan's desire theory and the discourse of self and the Other.Chapter Three is about the death of the goat and how the subjects in this play fail to pursue the wholeness of their being in the real order.The last part works towards the conclusion that the goat,as the animal Other,elicits the hidden desire of human beings.And then the author further illustrates that by including the animal image in his plays,Albee tests the limitation of human civilization and demonstrates the social value of literature.