Dr. Hossein Aliakbari Harehdasht, Dr. Abdolmohammad Movahhed & Zahra Sheikhi Shahidzadeh
Persian Gulf University of Bushehr, Iran
Edward Albee’s The Play About the Baby portrays the dilemmas of the human condition in general and more specifically the conflicts of a couple in contemporary time. The young couple of the play, Boy and Girl, are in the grip of their inner conflicts. These internal entanglements happen as a result of the sufferings and harsh realities at the heart of their lives and the play demonstrates how these characters perceive themselves through their emotional attachment to their new-born baby whom they treasure most. Throughout the play, an older generation’s rite of passage unexpectedly leads the younger generation to examine the choice between illusion and a life built on false opinion or reality and honest thinking. Hence, the objective of this paper is to explore the reasons behind these oppositional concepts of illusion and reality. To this end, deploying Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance, the authors of this paper focus on how the young generation in the play deal with the problems of illusion and reality.
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The International Conference on Current Issues of Languages, Dialects and Linguistics (WWW.TLLL.IR), 2-3 February 2017, Ahwaz.
