'The Ghost Sonata': Poison and Vision

Abstract

The plays of August Strindberg shook up drama to represent the process of  destruction of meaning and its residual content. While in traditional drama  transcendent meaning was an essential part of the play, in Strindberg, this  meaning — an aspect that guarantees unity and coherence — is suspended.  Thus, his chamber plays were gradually be stripped of their instrumental  and dramatic conventions: there is virtually no situation, action, conflict or  psychological depth to the characters. Specifically, The Ghost Sonata shows  a clear loss of referentiality, from outside to inside, as we advance through  its three movements, opening a trend towards subjectivism. The information  provided is skewed and the perception of reality, from another point of view,  causes a strangeness of the everyday, as well as suspicion about the makeup  of modern identity. 

The objective of this article is, therefore, to provide a hermeneutic reading  of The Ghost Sonata to endeavour to understand which elements produce  this disarticulation with respect to the drama of his time, and how these processes  are still present in today’s dramaturgy.