Word: dillon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...likes hungry artists, that she disburses money as well as love, and that she acts as "a kind of emotional soup kitchen." Perhaps this line of characterization is put in to explain why, though it is a near thing, she refuses to enter the same kind of relationship with Dillon. But Ruth's situation is never adequately described or explained. Though as far as we know her she is interesting as well as plausible, she emerges as a collection of loose ends. Moreover, she tears the play apart. Her story and Dillon's never coalesce into one. As a result...
Shall I recite my epitaph to you? Yes, do recite your epitaph to me. "Here lies the body of George Dillon, aged thirty-four--or thereabouts--who thought, who hoped, he was that mysterious, ridiculous being called an artist. He never allowed himself one day of peace...He achieved nothing he set out to do. He made no one happy...he loved no one successfully. He was a bit of a bore, and, frankly, rather useless. But the germs loved...
...this raises the question, "What's eating George Dillon?"--the same question that is asked about Jimmy Porter, and about Osborne himself. Curiosity on this point, at least so far as it concerns Dillon, is never entirely satisfied; perhaps Osborne does not entirely know the answer (not to mention Creighton). But if Dillon's fury and hatred are not completely explained, they are convincingly dramatized; and we are let in on certain factors that help to account for them...
Ruth is a dramaturgic necessity. Soliloquies are unworkable in the realistic convention within which this play is written, and Dillon must have someone to talk to who will greet his outbursts with something other than scandalized incomprehension. But the authors have attempted to make something of her besides a confidante for Dillon. They have equipped her with some plot-material of her won, and her own bag-full of points to make...
...hard to know exactly what to make of Ruth. For a time she appears as a disillusioned Leftist intellectual: she says she has just quit the party, after "seventeen years. It's rather like walking out on a lover." She and Dillon discuss this major crisis in her life for half a page or so, and then drop it, permanently...