Learning Fairly Quickly About Alan's Violent Act, Term Paper

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Learning fairly quickly about Alan's violent act, throughout the play the entire play, the reader always faces the most important question that arises from the lines of the book: "why does Alan blind the horses

In order to be able to answer this question, the play needs to be approached from two different points-of-view. The first one would be the real world, a world where such an act is not only not blamed, but fully not understood and catalogued as a psychiatric problem. On the other hand, we have the "equus" world, created by the author to support such acts. As Peter Shaffer himself states, equus "creates a mental world in which the deed could be made comprehensible"

Hesther gives the best overall evaluation of what the real world thinks of the act: "the boy's in pain ... That's all I see"

. This is an obvious reaction that many people have when faced with something they do not understand, especially with an individual's own beliefs and reactions, too deep and obscure to be considered anything else than a problematic pain. For all members of the real world, Alan Strang is in pain, his act was caused by inner sufferance.

On the other hand, we have the "equus" world, a mythological world born from Alan's imagination.

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There are no rules in the "equus" world or rather there are different rules, rules that only the priests of the horse-god can understand and put into practice. Most important of all, Alan's imagination plays the demiurgic role and creates the status necessary for all actions. Rather than a deregulated world, the "equus" world is a world with rules of its own and a way of functioning that cannot be understood.

These two worlds are interconnected by the presence of Martin Dysart, the psychiatrist who attempts on one side to cure Alan and, on the other, to understand the rules of his imaginary world and replicate them functionally in the real world. According to him, "the Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health, and I am his Priest"

. He is the necessary presence that needs to explain the unnatural, while transposing it, usually modified, in the real world.

The presentation was necessary in order to adapt the solutions to the problem, as it was described in the initial paragraph, from several different perspectives. First of all, the imaginary perspective, as it appears in Alan's world. If we look at his imagination, the way it functions and the mythological creation he lives in, with the horse-god equus….....

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