Purgatory
Summary
- W.B.Yeats
The play written by W.B Yeats explores the human relation to
the supernatural world. It is written on the belief that the soul of the dead
body goes to the purgatory before going to heaven and purgatory is such a place
where the soul of the dead body gets cleansed for pardonable sins before going
to heaven. In the play, the playwright shows the Christian traditional belief
on life after death.
In the play, the souls of the old man’s parents suffer in
purgatory as they had committed different crimes when they were in this visible
world. His mother didn't follow the advice of her parents and his father
destroyed everything in his life by drinking and spending a lot. Destruction
takes place throughout the play. The main theme is the crime of older
generation may be repeated by the new generations in an endless cycle of life.
It also suggests if the head of the family is bad, the children become the
sufferer in this visible world or the polluted blood always passes on the
polluted blood. It is about a patricide as the old man kills his father and it
is about a homicide as he kills his own son. For the first time, he commits his
sin that he had committed many years ago and being worried about purgatory life
or to break the tradition of his family, he kills his own son and feels happy.
One night, the old man and the boy were passing through a
ruined house. The old man made the boy stop there and asked him to study the
house. But the boy didn't want to stop since he could see only a bare tree.
However, he entered the house and commented about it that there were no
windows, no floor and no roof. When they were talking in a friendly way, he
revealed that it was a house where he was born, where many great people had
lived and died. He also informed the boy that the house was owned by his mother
and later it was occupied by his father. He told the boy again and again that
the spirit of his mother and father were living there.
This present remark makes the son because he knew that he
had killed his grandfather. Actually when the old man's mother died in child
bearing, his father spent money by drinking and having relationship with other
women. The old man during his childhood wasn't sent to school for having a good
education but was taught by the priest at home. When he was sixteen years old,
his father had burnt down the house in a drunken frenzy and he had killed him
and had escaped from there. At the same time, the old man heard the hoof-beats
of the horse and asked the boy to listen to it but the boy couldn't hear any sound
and mockingly accused his father of madness. The old man remembered/imagined
the wedding night of his parents. At that time, the boy tried to seize the bag
carried by old man. In the struggle of seizing the bag, all the money was
scattered on the ground. While the boy was trying to collect the money, the old
man stabbed him to death with a same knife that he killed his father. Then he
prayed to god asking to release his mother's soul from purgatory. He also said
that he had killed his son to stop the polluted blood passing on and on, and to
stop the violence forever.
Q: What is the old man's motive in murdering the boy?
Ans: The old man being a catholic believed that his mother's
soul still suffered in purgatory because of the sins she committed and because
of the polluted blood that flows within him and his son. He believes that his
mother's soul will never rest in peace until the cycle of polluted blood flowed
in his generations. Moreover, his son trying to seize the money from him
convinced him that his son would commit more sins later and pollute the blood
even more. Thus, in order to help his mother's soul rest in peace in heaven and
to end the cycle of the sins committed by polluted blood, he killed the boy.
Above all, the old man's motive in murdering the boy was to lessen the
sufferings in purgatory after death.
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