Brian Friels Faith Healer and Molly Sweeney in the context of parable poetics

Brian Friel is a prominent Irish dramatist. His plays are known far outside Ireland.His works united two major tendencies of the Irish theatre of the 20th century: on the one hand, the process of internationalisation of theIrish drama, with the all more confidently mastering experience of the world theatre, on the other hand, searches of roots in the nationalculture. Friel uses parable structures in the works very often. His plays, Faith Healer and Molly Sweeney, are confirmation of that idea.They have a monodramatic complex as the basic composition. The Faith Healer has two types of the teller - real (Teddy) and infernal(Francis, Grace). These two types of the teller form the space-temporal opposition in the text: infernal  celestial. The Faith Healermonodramatic complex is connected with principles of composition, giving a text the parable valency. There is a dramatic anaphoraprinciple, a composite contrast, and a circular composition in the text. Dramatic anaphora is the recurrence of separate words and stagesettings in the beginning of several acts. Dramatic anaphora emotionally affects spectators and creates an existential continuum. A compositecontrast is a contrast between separate acts and characters of the play. The first and last acts-monologues are devoted to the protagonist- Frank: that is the circular composition. The Molly Sweeney is very interesting too. Neither the plot chart, isolated from thecontext, nor the external conflict, generated by such chart, signals about a possibility of the parable understanding of that play. However,the deciphering codes, which Friel introduced in the text, convert an ordinary story into a dramatic parable with a polyvariant-impliedsense. The deciphering codes include: authors metasubject comments, the Bible reminiscences, Job-situation archetype, insertedstories-microparables, and Easter chronotop. Research of the system of parable codes in the context of Friels playwriting allows extendingthe picture of genre nature of his creative works.

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