The Visit Parallelism

Imagine someone being cut so deep, by the person they love, that for the rest of their life they plot for deadly revenge. Well in the play The Visit, one of the main characters, Claire, is burned deep by the her childhood love, Schill. In the play, The Visit, by Friedrich Durrenmatt multiple lessons can be learned from the actions of the character’s, one of these are the greed can consume people, changing their morals, and making them do things they otherwise wouldn’t have done. The parallelism in this play showed the changes in the morals of the town and characters throughout the story. One of the parallel scenes is when Claire comes into town, when Claire leaves town. The town have gone through major changes, in time between Claire being welcomed into the town and leaving the town. At first the one of the townspeople claims “We may be poor but we are not heathens. In the name of the town Gullen, I decline your offer. In the name of humanity. We shall never accept”(38). In the end the townspeople have exchanged their morals for a town of “blinding and somewhat technical perfection”(87). This display of parallelism exemplifies the moral changes the changes of the whole

At many points in the play symbolism was used with the foreshadowing to make it less obvious. For example, Claire calls Schill “my black panther” (17). Later on in the play, Claire’s pet “panther is no more” (58). The pet panther symbolizes Schill, which foreshadows his death. During this part of the play, all of the character’s give Schill the impression they would never cause harm to him for money, the scene where the Claire’s pet panther is killed gives the reader a clue, to what will happen. By giving the readers hints as to what will happen in the end, gives a better understanding of how didn’t know how the people in the town were changing into different people even without knowing