Eugene O’neill’s The Hairy Ape And Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

Abstract

The present paper deals with the pathos of communication in the 20th Century literature; more precisely, how language is no more fulfilling its role as a means of communication which leads to the collapse of verbal communication in favor of silence. Relying on Winston Weathers‟ study “Communications and Tragedy in Eugene O‟Neill,” the research attempts to extract the failure of communication by conducting a comparative study between the American author Eugene O‟Neill and his play The Hairy Ape(1922)and the English writer Virginia Woolf with her novel Mrs. Dalloway(1925). The final results of this study assert skepticism towards words and consolidate the failure of verbal communication in favor of a new means of communication: silence which is pushed to its most extreme form (death).