Word: dillon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...background of the play consists not only of the Elliots' drab and ugly house, but of their drab and ugly lives. George Dillon, who comes to live among these simple, honest, somewhat somambulistic folk, is eloquent about their mindlessness at great length...
...Dillon himself is an artist, an actor-playwright to be specific--and a thorough second-rater. Like Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, he is suffering from "the pain of being alive," and it stings him into delivering tirades, presumably on the authors' behalf, concerning such matters as religion, the middle-class mind, and the relationship of life to art. These tirades are neither so long, so frequent, nor so good as Jimmy Porter's similar tirades, but they are well...
...Dillon is suffering from the particular pain of being an artist, and the even more poignant and particular pain of not being a good one. "What is worse," he says, than the "disease" of talent...
...order to find out, Dillon first seduces and then gets engaged to the Elliot daughter, Josie, a member of the English equivalent of our local rock-'n'-roll-hair-curlers-and-chewing-gum set, who is neither warm, generous, nor particularly honest-to-goodness...
Taking Josie to bed and to wife is not a rational act on Dillon's part, but an admission of defeat; a retreat into the ghastly middle-class morass that he describes so frequently and with such emphatic relish; a form of suicide. Having effected this mock-death, he speaks his own epitaph, in which he convicts himself of total futility...