The Sense Of Loss In David Rabe’s Major Plays:

Wael Mohamed Abdel-hakam Mohamed

This dissertation investigates the sense of loss in six plays for David Rabe: The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones, Streamers, In the Boom Boom Room, Goose and Tomtom, and Hurlyburly. In these plays, Rabe captures the lost individual whose attempts to crack the complex codes of his enigma end in failure. Unfortunately enough, this failure extends to invade the familial and the social lives as well. Consequently, the how and why questions of such a dilemma constitute the cornerstone of this study.In pursuit of this goal, the “scapegoat archetype” is recalled as it spells out the reasons for the prevalence of loss in the characters’ lives and shows its effect on the American society members due to the Vietnam War. Therefore, the study attempts to explore the root causes rather than the end results of such a dilemma.The audience, thus, sees why Rabe’s characters revolve around a cycle of an endless suffering. On the individual level, these characters, whether civilians or even militants, get to experience the bitterness of the feeling of loss since they feel that they are no more than pawns in the hands of an unknown enemy. However, the study shows that they do not passively yield to such a dark future. Instead, they struggle deadly to evade it, but, nonetheless, their incessant endeavor and persistent struggle to get out of this doomed dark fate ends in vain and illusion. Yet, their serious attempts grant them heroism.