Rat-Catching Greetings from Hamelin (c.1930) by postaletrice.
- Play title: The Pillowman
- Author: Martin McDonagh
- First performed: 2003
- Page count: 70
Summary
The Pillowman is a black comedy by Martin McDonagh. The central character is an abattoir worker named Katurian who is arrested for reasons initially unknown to him. A police interrogation room in an unidentified totalitarian state is the main setting. The police engage in unorthodox and often brutal methods to extract detainees’ confessions. Katurian, who is also a writer, quickly realizes that he is being interrogated about the recent murders of several children. The police investigators attempt to establish a link between the short stories written by Katurian and these gruesome murders. The plot itself unfolds through a series of fairy-tale-style stories, many of which have quite adult themes including child abuse and violence. These stories are a mixture of original works written by Katurian with “The Pillowman” being a prime example, but there are also his reworkings of traditional fairy tales like The Pied Piper of Hamelin. McDonagh combines macabre tales with tension-breaking black humour. The resulting play was a great theatrical success. The work poses key questions about the value of art. Also, does art imitate life, or is the reverse true?
Ways to access the text: reading
The play is available for free via the Open Library website.
There is no audiobook version of this play. As McDonagh is a contemporary writer, I would recommend purchasing one of his other works if you enjoy this play.
Why read The Pillowman?
A Horrible Writer
Katurian K. Katurian is a bad person and a bad writer too! But maybe he is far more. McDonagh’s presentation of the lead character is loaded with unexpected twists and is also quite ironic. Katurian has a menial job at a local abattoir but considers his true profession to be writing. Yet of his approximately four hundred stories, just one has been published. This is Katurian’s eccentric twist on the tale of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. He has mundanely renamed the classic as “The Tale of the Town on the River,” and any ingenuity evident in this new version relies heavily on a reader’s familiarity with the original. Even though success has eluded Katurian in real life, he has conveniently authored a semi-autobiographical story in which one learns that his first book was published in his teenage years. Katurian believes assuredly in his art – to the degree that his own life along with the lives of others are deemed less valuable than his collected stories! As Katurian lives in a totalitarian state, one may expect that his writings contain serious political allegories or are openly seditious works. On the contrary, when Katurian is questioned by the police about his stories, he is adamant that they possess no political content or social commentary whatsoever, and he will gladly edit/censor his work to remove any hint of offending material if needed. In short, McDonagh presents a delusional egotist with limited or at best undiscovered literary abilities who serves as a mockery of certain writerly types. However, Katurian as a character, horrible and all as he may be, is representative of a bigger debate in the world of art.
Once upon a time …
In The Pillowman, McDonagh utilizes the narrative frame of a police interrogation, but the dialogues are strangely interspersed with fairy tales. “Once upon a time” is the unmistakable opening line hook that will ultimately lead the reader to the crimes at the centre of the play, namely horrendous child murders. McDonagh’s technique of inserting little stories serves a varied selection of purposes within the play. For instance, the proud writer Katurian narrates many of his tales to the police officers who become his long-awaited, eager audience. Since the context is a criminal investigation, one’s attention becomes keenly focused on several issues: the power of storytelling, the responsibilities of an author, the blurry line between fiction and fact, and the problem of interpretation. While “The Pillowman” is indeed one of the most striking tales, there are seven other tales told within the play. McDonagh is well known for his confronting style of drama since it contains violence and expletives. These little fairy tales are fittingly adult-themed and gruesome. Fortunately for the reader, the hyperbole of some scenes deliberately tips the play into wonderfully comic moments thus achieving an alchemy that few other writers would even dare to attempt. McDonagh serves his audience with an adult tale of once upon a crime.
Post-reading discussion/interpretation.
An Allegorical Play
Is The Pillowman an allegory? This question is probably the most important question one can ask about McDonagh’s play. As most readers are aware, an allegorical work has two layers of meaning beginning with the surface or literal meaning and then the secondary level or less obvious message that the story represents, for example, a typical kind of character, situation, or idea. The correct classification of McDonagh’s work is vital as it goes to the heart of a play that asks if Katurian’s seemingly harmless short stories are responsible for a series of child murders. If one classifies The Pillowman as an allegory, then it is accordingly a didactic work. This contrasts with a purely imaginative work: something written solely to please or amuse at an artistic level. If McDonagh’s play is an allegory, then this indicates authorial intent because such works are intentionally constructed to be readable on two distinct levels. As Gary Johnson writes in The Vitality of Allegory: “the author’s rhetorical purpose is the governing force behind allegory.” However, for an author to state openly that a work is allegorical and that the ‘true’ meaning is x, y, or z is to miss the point somewhat. A reader’s avid interest in a text helps to reveal the second level of meaning. For example, a work like George Orwell’s Animal Farm is tragically ruined for modern readers as they expect an allegory. As Johnson explains about allegory, “the author’s intention becomes knowable through the details of the text and its construction.” An allegory requires a reader to work a little to decipher the full meaning. Johnson outlines three criteria that one may use to assess if a work is allegorical.
“;1) the author, his or her intention, and the context of composition; 2) the text itself; and 3) readerly concerns.”
In the absence of McDonagh’s stated meaning of his text, we must rely more heavily on textual evidence and the readerly concerns noted by Johnson. “Readerly concerns” include the problematic topic of allegoresis, which effectively means that a reader may choose to interpret a work allegorically, based on a plausible argument, even if the author did not intend it as such. If a play is indeed allegorical, then it works well at both levels of communication (the literal and representative). Also, as Johnson states, “Allegory, unlike metaphor, is a concept that we can apply only within the context of a narrative.” This indicates that one does not look for individual examples of comparisons, but a sustained approach where an idea is transformed in the narrative. For instance, the best-known example comes from John Bunyan who took the concept of Christian salvation and transformed it into a story of one man’s extraordinary journey in The Pilgrim’s Progress. It must be noted that to treat McDonagh’s play as allegorical is not without its complications, yet such an interpretative approach offers one of the most satisfying resolutions to the play’s meaning(s). The arguments for the play as an allegorical work rest on two key pillars: the representation of Katurian and the use of fairy tales.
Even though this essay will focus on Katurian and fairy tales, it would be a flawed exercise if it lacked any indication of McDonagh’s personal view since authorial intent is so important to allegory. As previously noted, the playwright has never stated that The Pillowman means a particular thing or should be interpreted in a certain way. However, in an interview with Patrick Pacheco of the Los Angeles Times in 2005, McDonagh expressed his views on creativity, responsibility, and culpability as follows. The below snippet is quite enlightening.
“In terms of the larger issues he [Martin McDonagh] raises about creativity and the writer’s moral responsibilities, he says, there are no easy answers. ‘I think it does say that creativity is beautiful and worthwhile for its own sake,’ he says, ‘But in terms of responsibility? I don’t think that Martin Scorsese can be held responsible because John Hinckley saw ‘Taxi Driver’ many times and became obsessed with Jodie Foster. If something happened to a child after a person saw ‘Pillowman,’ I’d definitely feel guilty about it, but I wouldn’t be culpable.’”
McDonagh’s views are clear. He states plainly that an artist does not have responsibility for how his/her work is interpreted. He also states that a work of art may be “beautiful and worthwhile for its own sake,” which would eschew an expectation that art should instruct in some way. Yet he is also acutely aware of the predicament that artists are placed in regarding a kind of enforced responsibility for their art. This does not prove that The Pillowman is/is not allegorical, but it shows that McDonagh was quite sensitive to the situation someone like Katurian finds himself in. The playwright’s consciousness of a particular predicament appears to find a voice in the play.
To be explicit, this essay is working from the assumption that McDonagh allegorizes the predicament of a writer being held responsible for his/her work. There is compelling evidence that Katurian is not only a writer within this particular story, but that he also allegorizes the archetypal figure of the writer, albeit an unflattering example. The evidence for this view is extensive. First, the play is set in an unnamed totalitarian state and therefore representative of any such oppressive regime. Consequently, any writer in said state is a representative of free speech in the form of artistic freedom. Even detective Tupolski defines Katurian by his profession alone, saying “We like executing writers … you execute a writer, it sends out a signal, y’know?” As Katurian is being interrogated and tortured on account of his stories, art itself is being put on trial in the play. The main questions being asked about art are – what does it mean? (i.e., the true/hidden meaning), what does it cause? (in this case, possibly murder!) and what is its worth? (human life according to Katurian). The artist as the original source of a work is considered to have ultimate responsibility.
There is one major complication. The manner in which McDonagh represents Katurian is decidedly ironic and as a result comedic. For instance, Katurian is representative of the figure of the writer, an almost hallowed figure in the context of oppressive regimes, yet he denies his work has any message at all and pre-emptively agrees to any censorship that may be requested of him. Additionally, Katurian is glad to abide by the quite restrictive “guidelines” within which artists would work in a country under dictatorship. However, a doubt lingers in police minds as to whether or not he has a “political axe to grind”? He responds that he has “no axe to grind, no anything to grind. No social anything whatsoever.” Katurian goes to the extreme of saying that if parts of his work seem even remotely political: “I’ll take it straight out. Fucking burn it.” McDonagh’s presentation of the idiosyncratic Katurian serves to amuse a reader and deflate the heroic status of writers, but the irony needs further analysis. One solid interpretation is that Katurian’s ironic presentation, his utter inability to imagine that his work has any hidden meaning, actually shields him. Plus, it accentuates our impression of him as the wronged party. In a broad overview, if one accepts that Katurian allegorizes the archetypal writer then the salient point is that despite his total innocence, he is condemned for his work and can say nothing to absolve himself. It is a depiction of the writer being put in an utterly absurd situation. In this light, McDonagh is sympathetic to a writer’s plight and Katurian does indeed represent a dilemma beyond/outside his own story, thus satisfying the second level of signification in allegory.
McDonagh places quite a noticeable emphasis on allegory in the play. For instance, Tupolski asks Katurian specifically about his story “The Little Apple Men,” remarking that the father in the tale, “he represents something, does he?” This opens a discussion about how one may interpret a work versus what the author intended. Tupolski is a police detective in a totalitarian state and has an unusual level of power to conclusively interpret things. He tries to pin Katurian down regarding his stories’ core message. According to Tupolski, the stories have a common theme, namely, “some poor little kid gets fucked up” and they all have “murdered children in [them].” Katurian counters with the rhetorical statement, “Do you think I’m trying to say, ‘Go out and murder children’?” Yet in the context of a police investigation, the stories are indeed seen as allegorical, as hiding a vital clue.
On a formal level, one may say that stories are either mimetic (representative) or didactic (instructive), and this point comes to the fore in Katurian’s interrogation. As the writer is busy professing his innocence, he pointedly asks Tupolski, “Are you trying to say I shouldn’t write stories with child killings in because in the real world there are child killings?” As such, Katurian is simply stating that his stories are mimetic: in contrast to stories that instruct their readers in some way. When Katurian and Tupolski discuss the story “The Three Gibbet Crossroads,” the detective observes, “It is saying to me, on the surface I am saying this, but underneath the surface I am saying this other thing.” This is a definition of allegory. As the interrogation progresses, Tupolski manages to establish not only Katurian’s main theme, which is seemingly child murder, but also to ascertain that he personally chose the topics for his stories because The Libertad did not request them. There is, of course, a differentiation to be made between Katurian’s stories being allegorical and the stories being the actual cause of murders. Yet in the most exhilarating twist of the play, allegory is suddenly transformed into a horrific recipe for murders when Katurian’s brother Michal says, “All the things I did to all the kids I got from stories you wrote and read out to me.” It is not the stories’ content alone but also Katurian’s parental style of reading aloud to his brother that solidifies the idea that the message they impart is pedagogical. Tupolski also views Katurian’s stories as the cause of the crimes: a sort of manual, “a hundred and one ways to skewer a fucking five-year-old.” By acting out the stories literally, Michal creates manifold problems for Katurian, but it also highlights certain issues for the play’s audience. For example, Katurian’s tales are in the genre of fairy tales, which are, generally speaking, moralistic tales told as an instruction to children, and yes, Michal is childlike in many respects. Thus, McDonagh creates the writer’s nightmare scenario where not only do the police link his artistic tales to murder but a child-like figure interprets them as murder manuals and acts them out!
Next, McDonagh cleverly flips the scenario – exposing how a failed writer will stoop to almost anything to have his works considered influential. Many judgments are imposed on Katurian’s art such as various interpretations and presumed causations. However, Katurian alone largely decides on the final estimation of the value of his art. The value of Katurian’s mostly unpublished stories becomes a major topic for contemplation in the play. At the start, we are told that Katurian’s evolution as a writer was largely dependent on his parents’ “artistic experiment.” He heard the “muffled screams of a small, gagged child” et cetera, which resulted in his nightmares and consequently “his stories got darker and daker and darker.” As a sidebar, one could argue that if Katurian’s new, darker tales are the result of nightmares, then McDonagh is giving a nod to the well-known allegorical trope of the dream vision (a nightmare in this case) that results in an allegorical story. In regard to Katurian’s artistic skills, it is notable that it was specifically his parents’ “love and encouragement” that helped improve his writing and not the distress caused by the experiment, which simply altered the subject matter. Ultimately, it is only Katurian who believes that his stories have true artistic value. After all, they remain unpublished except one, and even though his brother is a fan, it is important to remember that this brother is not only mentally retarded but also a killer. Katurian’s own amorality comes to the fore when he states that he would prefer to see his brother and then himself sacrificed “and I’d have it be the stories they saved.” As Katurian declares, “It isn’t about being or not being dead. It’s about what you leave behind.” McDonagh is exposing the dark underbelly of the ruthless artist. This is made explicit when, in the play’s second major twist, Katurian agrees to confess to all the murders so he can guarantee the survival of his story collection. It is paradoxically the inclusion of the stories within the file of a serial murderer that will establish their fame. Stories that currently have no discernible value except to the egotistical writer Katurian are invested with an artificial value because they become, in criminal terms, the guidebook for a killer. McDonagh is mocking many writers’ misplaced belief in their own works’ value, but he is also describing how a story may forcibly become an allegory – after the fact. Katurian deliberately merges the identities of the killer with the writer thus transforming his tales into a prelude to murder. Since the dark tales existed before the murders, they cannot be a description of those real-life events (like a subsequent newspaper account would be). Nonetheless, they are interpreted as having caused the actions they depict in what is modernly known as copycat style. Earlier, when Michal confessed – Katurian’s stories were weirdly metamorphosized before the writer’s eyes and this was notably outside of his control. Now, Katurian consciously manipulates the bad situation to falsify authorial intent – as if it were always hidden inside the stories like a horrible worm within the fairy-tale apple.
McDonagh’s decision to present the play as a collage of strange fairy tales makes the work highly distinctive, instructive, and complex. In general terms, fairy tales are told by parents to their children for entertainment, to impart a hidden lesson or moral (allegorical nature), and to send them to sleep. In this way, an authority figure imparts a life lesson to a child. The original author of such tales held the ultimate authority to craft the specific message. One may assuredly name the stories in McDonagh’s play as fairy tales because they invariably begin with the classic line, “once upon a time.” Additionally, not only are some of the tales already known to readers as containing allegorical meanings but some of the new tales are interpreted by the play’s characters as also being allegorical. Therefore, Katurian tells a selection of fairy tales, some plagiarized and some original, but all of them have a clear message. An analysis of the individual stories represents a slight shift of focus in this essay from the allegorical representation of the writer Katurian, which is the overarching idea behind the play, to interpreting the clues contained in the allegorical stories themselves. One begins to comprehend that McDonagh’s treatment of the theme of allegory is multi-layered and complex. The list of tales told in the play is as follows.
Act One, Scene 1.
“The Little Apple Men.”
“The Tale of the Three Gibbet Crossroads.”
“The Tale of the Town on the River” (aka The Pied Piper of Hamelin).
Act One, Scene 2.
“The Writer and the Writer’s Brother” (semi-autobiographical tale of Katurian’s childhood).
Postscript to above story where Katurian tells, “more self-incriminating details of the truer story.”
Act Two, Scene 1.
“The Little Green Pig” (Michal’s failed attempt to tell this tale).
“The Pillowman.”
“The Little Green Pig” (Katurian’s full version).
Act Two, Scene 2.
“The Little Jesus.”
Act Three.
“The Story of the Little Deaf Boy on the Big Long Railroad Tracks. In China” (Tupolski’s story).
“Footnote to a story” (Katurian’s 7 and ¾ seconds story of the “Pillowman” and Michal).
This selection of stories may be used to address, though, from a slightly different angle, the questions raised much earlier about the interpretation, causality, and value of art. To begin, one may focus on two of Katurian’s borrowed and highly allegorical tales: “The Little Jesus” and “The Tale of the Town on the River.” Much like a biblical parable, “The Little Jesus” depicts a child who takes Christ as a literal example of how to live one’s life, which is indeed the core of Christian teachings. This tale is instrumental in the play because it illustrates how children may too literally and therefore erroneously interpret a story. The second story is based on The Pied Piper of Hamelin. The moral of the original tale is that any bargain made in good faith should be honoured. If the Pied Piper was paid his dues, then the people of Hamelin would have had nothing to fear. However, Katurian distorts the moral lessons, and the stories of Jesus and the Pied Piper are used to create new, quite-adult tales solely for entertainment. The story of Jesus’s blood sacrifice for all humanity becomes a literal guide for the various stages of torture used to punish a misguided child. The Pied Piper is transformed from an aggrieved rat-catcher into a deliberate child snatcher. At the surface, literal level, these tales by Katurian may appear like torture manuals but that is evidently not the allegorical meaning.
To understand the new tales, one must look to the “artistic experiment” that Katurian’s parents conducted on him that resulted in “darker and darker” tales. A writer who has been psychologically (re)programmed in this manner consequently distorts functional moral allegories into twisted, gratuitous tales of horror. In another example, Katurian’s tale of “The Little Apple Men,” the story initially appears to be one about poetic justice since a cruel father inadvertently dies due to his greed, but the twist at the end turns it into a shocking blood fest. Regarding the issue of causality, Katurian’s parents’ experiment of exposing him to a nightly soundscape of horror serves to transform good into bad in moralistic terms. For instance, one of Katurian’s first stories named “The Little Green Pig,” in which a little piglet “liked being a little bit different, a little bit peculiar,” becomes in many ways the template for the darker tales where children are also made distinctly peculiar. One child copies the example of Jesus a little too ardently and the other has his toes cut off. Both tales share the theme of suffering. Therefore, we cease to look for the stories’ representational merits and begin instead to consider why they are shaped or reshaped by Katurian in his specific style with the theme of child murder (as Tupolski points out). Katurian’s childhood, where suffering was normalized, is apparently the cause behind the reshaping of perfectly moral, child-appropriate tales into malign tales of horror. Jesus’s example becomes wholly devoid of meaning while the disabled child of the original Pied Piper tale suffers a new and cruel injury. The second layer of meaning (if any) beneath the literal meaning of Katurian’s stories is the quite hopeless message that suffering is inevitable. In these examples, it is not that he creates allegories but rather he destroys or dismantles them and then forces us to look not at art’s causality, but at the causality of Katurian’s art.
One of Katurian’s tales deals implicitly with the role of the writer. “The Tale of the Three Gibbet Crossroads,” which Katurian describes as “a puzzle without a solution,” is arguably an allegory of the writer’s predicament in society. Like Katurian, the man in the gibbet has been imprisoned for an unspecified crime. The crime is evidently not murder or rape like the other prisoners because the man’s gibbet placard elicits a quite different reaction from people. Whatever the crime, it is equally abhorred by both good and bad citizens, nuns and highwaymen alike. An important clue to the story’s allegorical meaning is that Katurian says “because there is nothing worse, is there? Than the two things it [the story] says.” We are told that the gibbet prisoner, “knows he was guilty of the crime they put him in there for, but he cannot remember what the crime was.” The prisoner cries out at the end of the story to be told his crime but receives no answer. By deduction, it is clear that not remembering/not being told about the crime is certainly one of the two bad things. Maybe the second bad thing is the man’s fear of being murdered, but he faces a slow death in the gibbet anyway. It is more plausible that the second awful thing that Katurian refers to is the prisoner’s previously acknowledged guilt. The tale essentially allegorizes the writer’s predicament. The man in the gibbet shows us the surface level of meaning, visible and clear, but the placard is the hidden meaning, what Tupolski calls “a pointer.” This placard is how all others, which means everyone except the writer (gibbet prisoner), interpret his life’s work. Any writer is inescapably guilty of producing the work that bears his name, but he has no control over how others interpret it. For example, if Katurian was the man in the gibbet then “child murderer” would be written on his placard.
Katurian comments on the gibbet prisoner story, saying “That’s a good story. That’s something-esque,” which is comically vague as it only means the story is ‘in the style’ of something. One fitting term is Kafkaesque as it would describe the illogical and nightmarish predicament of both the man in the gibbet and the writer he represents. McDonagh continuously portrays Katurian as obtuse to the import of his own stories. This is a case of structural irony: a technique that forces the reader to interpret the situation more fully, just like one has to do with the Gibbet story. Tupolski’s tale, “The Story of the Little Deaf Boy on the Big Long Railroad Tracks. In China,” is illustrative of a story where the secondary meaning is utterly elusive or simply absent. The detective strives to shoehorn an allegorical meaning into the text, to the bemusement of Katurian. The clear contrast between the two tales is that the ‘gibbet prisoner tale’ works well on both levels of signification whereas Tupolski’s tale requires that he laboriously explain the correlation between himself and the old man in the tower thus proving the tale an allegorical failure.
As previously noted, Katurian believes steadfastly in his stories’ significance as genuinely artistic works. Two of the fairy tales reveal the value of Katurian’s story collection (to him). Much like a Russian doll effect, we find references to stories within stories like hidden treasures. Indeed, one observes that almost all aspects of the play exhibit elements of doubling, outer and inner layers, and mirroring effects. These add to the interpretative possibilities of the work. Katurian’s story “The Writer and the Writer’s Brother” is an interesting example because it contains a reference to a story by Michal, “a story that was better than any of my [Katurian’s] stories.” When Michal finds and reads this ‘outer shell’ story, “The Writer and the Writer’s Brother,” he is unhappy about having been depicted as dead. Katurian protests that it has a “happy ending” because Michal had left behind an artistic legacy in the form of a story. However, earlier in the play, it was revealed that Katurian “burnt the story [Michal’s], and covered his brother back up.” Even in this fictional tale, Katurian is a ruthlessly ambitious writer who imagines burning the work of a better writer and hiding a dead body even when it is that of his own brother. The placement of stories within stories, mixing fact and fiction, serves to blur the lines of reality. The existence of Michal’s story, described by Katurian as “the sweetest, gentlest thing,” raises the possibility that “The Little Green Pig” is not Katurian’s work at all, but a story stolen from his once gifted brother, despite the assertion that it was burned. We witness a scene where Michal attempts to recite this story but gets confused due to his brain damage. Even if Katurian’s work is the result of plagiarism, the fact remains that he will take any steps necessary to preserve his story collection. First, Katurian agrees to confess to all the murders in exchange for the police’s promise to save his stories. However, the police discover flaws in his confession that prove that he did not kill any children. Then, police officer Ariel advises Katurian that they can only prove he killed his brother and that, “in light of the extenuating circumstances, I doubt it highly that you would be executed for it.” Rather than welcome this obvious escape route, Katurian perversely insists that he also killed his parents, thus tilting the scales against his chance of living. All this is done so that his stories will be saved. Then, in the last 7 and ¾ seconds of Katurian’s life, he concocts a story where the previously mentioned “Pillowman” visits Michal as a child and offers him a way out of his miserable future life. Michal, now a puppet-like figure in Katurian’s “footnote to a story,” decides emphatically to suffer the coming cruelties just so his brother will ultimately create his stories. Katurian not only sacrifices his own life for his story collection but he embeds within his tales the idea that his brother also willingly sacrificed himself by saying, “’cos I think I’m going to really like my brother’s stories.” It is no longer art for art’s sake, but life for art’s sake.
As has been explored in this essay, McDonagh clearly deals in allegory. The naïve narrator Katurian is in many respects a monstrous creation. Yet his obtuseness, his utter inability to see hidden meanings in his own work, acts as the perfect foil because others indulgently invest his work with any meanings that suit their purposes. For the police, the hidden meaning becomes child murder. The playwright also creates an exceptionally clever twist in the story. First, one witnesses how the writer loses control over how his work is interpreted – Katurian is forced into a series of denials when the police assert various meanings for his tales. Later, Katurian forcibly reshapes his work into allegory by merging the author and murderer into one single identity. Meanwhile, Katurian alternately creates and destroys mini allegorical tales. Hidden meanings are forcibly applied, misconstrued, obliterated through re-writing, or denied. All becomes an endless game of interpretation. McDonagh’s work derides the voraciously ambitious but talentless writer but also shields such a writer from the awesome burden of all the possible meanings others project onto his works. Art imitates life and vice versa. As an allegory, the play imparts one teaching – namely that any meaning that rests beneath the surface cannot be tamed, commanded, or contained.
The “Pillowman” – An Exceptional Tale
One of the most striking stories within the play is that of “The Pillowman.” The Pillowman’s purpose is to convince little children, who are already fated to have “horrific” lives, to commit suicide as a means of escaping their destinies. However, the Pillowman first meets these unfortunates as fully grown adults. He is intuitively summoned to their sides when they are on the point of committing suicide. This detail serves as proof that such individuals will assuredly reach this crisis point in their lives. It is then through fairy-tale magic that the Pillowman reverses time to just before each individual’s problems began. At this crucial and fleeting moment in history, he must convince the child that death is the better option. The Pillowman story is consoling to Detective Tupolski who remarks, “There was something gentle about it.” Tupolski describes his own family’s loss in the briefest manner: “Son drowned. (Pause.) Fishing on his own. (Pause.) Silly.” The detective highlights the three comforting aspects of the fairy tale, namely that the child didn’t die alone, that it was “the child’s choice, somehow,” and this stopped the death from being “just a stupid waste.” Yet the Pillowman is an exceptionally ambiguous figure who serves mainly to signify that some lives are indeed totally irredeemable, and therefore – not worth living.
McDonagh creates an eerie doppelganger effect in the tale. The Pillowman is a fairy-tale figure, yet in more frank terms, he is a child murderer in a story depicting the capture of a child murderer. The implicit comparisons between a true-life child killer and a storybook figure are abundant. For example, just as Michal somehow wins the confidence of little Andrea Jovacovic and Aaron Goldberg (whom he then murders), the Pillowman also needs “to look soft and safe, because of his job.” It becomes impossible to distinguish between the fictional and the real killer. Add to this Katurian’s particularly unsettling introduction to the Pillowman tale.
“Once upon a time … there was a man who did not look like normal men. He was about nine feet tall.”
Adult men may look scarily tall to little kids so the above description may encapsulate a child’s perspective on the world rather than depict a fantasy figure. As Michal has brain damage, he may also act somewhat strangely in the eyes of an unknowing child. Then there is the problem of a man wearing a costume to deliberately trick kiddies. Michal even says that the Pillowman reminds him of himself because, “you know, getting little children to die.” In fact, Michal and the man made of “pink pillows” have a shared pessimistic belief that “all children are going to lead horrible lives.” Furthermore, a pillow is the preferred murder weapon in the play. The list of people who are smothered to death includes Katurian’s parents, Ariel’s father, and eventually Michal himself. In this way, the kindly Pillowman’s costume takes on quite morbid connotations. The doubling effect constructed by the playwright robs the soft, kindly Pillowman of our trust. Instead, there is an enhanced foreboding that a horrible, malignant figure will step out of the storybook and into real life.
Despite the Pillowman’s elaborate costume, he is a quite traditional allegory of death. The distinction is that he is the Grim Reaper for children: a specialized and peculiarly dark occupation. One cannot accept the falsehood that this character is saving children from horrific lives because his sole task is actually to extinguish life. For comparative purposes, one may refer to Edgar Allan Poe’s depiction of the figure of death in his story, “The Masque of the Red Death.”
“The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat.”
This classic figure of death as described by Poe is one with which we are more familiar. One may also look to Hans Holbein’s famous woodcuts of The Dance of Death. Of particular interest is “The Child,” which depicts a skeletal figure who pulls a small child by the hand from his parent’s peasant hut.
In the case of the Pillowman, it is for the reader to look behind the deceptive mask and reveal the ghastly figure. The Pillowman’s compassionate representation is belied by the chilling descriptions of common causes of child deaths. Road accidents, suffocation, and accidental poisonings are explained in the story as cover stories: they are merely the means of disguising child suicides. These methods, which are decidedly violent, slow, and distressing, expose the true teleological aim of any figure who allegorizes death and that is to dispassionately snuff out life. McDonagh’s macabre, artistic creation has a clear warning for children– don’t talk to strange men even if they’re wearing an exceptionally cute costume!
Allegories of death are quite traditional and certainly out of vogue, so surely McDonagh is aiming for more in his innovative play. The work incorporates many dark fairy tales, but the playwright confronts the reader with one fairy tale of extraordinary potency. In the context of recounting fairy tales, a child rests his/her head on a soft pillow and drifts into a peaceful sleep after a parent reads a story. However, the Pillowman soon comes to spread horrific tales of twisted and cruel fates. All effective fairy tales teach an important lesson to children about the future: about the slings and arrows of the adult world. In contrast, the Pillowman must impart a horrific tale so mesmerizing to a child that it not only sends them to sleep but makes them choose eternal sleep. One type of story empowers while the other enfeebles. What the Pillowman proves is that he can spin a story of such rhetorical force that it has almost universal appeal, much like the Brothers Grimm’s tales, yet always seems crafted specifically for the one little child who hears it. The twist in the fairy tale is that the child who listens to the Pillowman invariably dies. It becomes the ‘ultimate’ story in the realm of dark fairy tales with McDonagh as its gifted creator.
Works Cited
Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Bantam, 1988.
Johnson, Gary. The Vitality of Allegory. The Ohio State University Press, 2012.
McDonagh, Martin. The Pillowman. Faber and Faber, 2003.
Pacheco, Patrick. “Laughing Matters.” Los Angeles Times, 22 May 2005.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Masque of the Red Death. Project Gutenberg, 2010.
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