Word: genet
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Moral authority, even in Genet's inverted world, carries with it moral responsibility. Snowball and Green Eyes are like two inverted Christ-figures. Green-Eyes says, "Here in the cell I'm the one who bears the whole brunt. The brunt of what--I don't know. I'm illiterate. But I know I need a strong back. The way Snowball bears the same weight. But for the whole prison...
There may be a whole underworld that shares the moral assumptions of Genet and his characters (it is clear from biographical and internal evidence that Genet has lived his life in the moral and physical world that Deathwatch portrays), but if so they are inarticulate and he is their voice. Genet can give us a new conception of the capabilities of the human soul. He is utterly different from normal, decent people, and that is his importance...
...with the most basic assumptions of his characters, the intensity of its reaction tends not to be proportional to the intensity of the emotions exposed onstage. For Deathwatch is really far out. Though such a dense, rich play does not easily lend itself to interpretive summary, it appears that Genet has attempted nothing less than a study of the metaphysics of evil...
...play's prison-cell setting is not only the pulpit for the exposition of Genet's peculiar theology. Our emotional involvement with Deathwatch comes from regarding it as a play about three men locked together closely enough so that the personality of each has the maximum opportunity to work subtly upon the others; three men racked with egotistic and homosexual tensions, preying upon each other's nerves, and driving each other towards explosions of verbal and physical violence which culminate in murder...
...virtue of this psychological quality that Deathwatch is a drama and not a philosophic dialogue. Genet is a skillfull dramatist, and he is well served in the present production...