Facing Death
Author: August Strindberg | Genre: One-Act Play
📖 1. Understanding the Text
Answer the following questions.
a. Where does the play take place?
=> Answer: The play takes place in the dining room of Monsieur Durand’s boarding house (pension) in French Switzerland, near Lake Geneva, during the 1880s.
b. Why have the baker and the butcher refused to provide supplies to Monsieur Durand’s household?
=> Answer: The baker and the butcher have refused to provide bread and meat because Monsieur Durand has accumulated extensive unpaid debts and his credit has been cut off. The family has run out of money to settle their long-standing bills.
c. How do the daughters treat their father Monsieur Durand at the beginning of the play?
=> Answer: The daughters (Adele, Annette, and Therese) treat their father with open disrespect, coldness, and hostility. They withhold food and coffee from him, mock his authority, and blame him entirely for their poverty and lack of prospects.
d. What truth about the deceased mother does Durand reveal to Adele?
=> Answer: Durand reveals that their idolized mother was an unfaithful spendthrift who squandered his ancestral fortune and her own dowry on foolish financial speculations. To hide her guilt, she systematically poisoned the children's minds against Durand, falsely portraying him as a stingy, tyrannical father.
e. What extreme step does Monsieur Durand take, and why?
=> Answer: Monsieur Durand sets fire to his insured boarding house and drinks poison. He takes this extreme step so that his daughters can collect a substantial fire and life insurance payout, which will save them from starvation, debt, and ruin.
📝 2. Reference to the Context
a. Sketch the character of Monsieur Durand. How does his quiet sacrifice contrast with his daughters' hostility?
=> Answer: Monsieur Durand is a former French railway worker and pensioner who runs a failing boarding house. He is patient, long-suffering, and deeply loving. Despite enduring starvation and harsh insults from his daughters, he bears their cruelty in silence to protect them from the painful truth about their mother. His final act of self-sacrifice—giving up his life so they can inherit insurance money—proves his noble paternal devotion, directly contrasting with their ungrateful behavior.
b. "Facing Death" is considered a modern tragedy of naturalism. Discuss how financial pressure and social environment crush the protagonist.
=> Answer: In naturalist drama, characters are depicted as victims of material conditions, hereditary traits, and economic forces beyond their control. In Facing Death, Durand is trapped by relentless poverty, unpaid debts, and social abandonment. There is no supernatural fate; instead, socioeconomic pressures corner him until suicide and arson become the only practical solution to ensure his children's physical survival.
c. Discuss the theme of parental sacrifice in the play. Is Durand's final action an act of despair or noble fatherly love?
=> Answer: Durand's final action is a tragic combination of despair and profound paternal love. Faced with imminent eviction and seeing no honorable way to support his daughters, he calculates that his death is worth more to them than his life. While driven by economic desperation, his willingness to endure a painful death by poison and fire to provide for his children represents the ultimate expression of fatherly devotion.
d. How did the deceased mother’s financial mismanagement and deceit ruin the family?
=> Answer: The deceased mother squandered the family's assets through reckless financial speculation. To deflect blame, she taught her daughters to hate their father, fabricating lies about his selfishness. This psychological manipulation destroyed domestic harmony, leaving Durand emotionally isolated and his daughters trapped in poverty and misplaced resentment.
🌐 3. Reference beyond the Text
a. Write an essay on the economic pressures faced by parents in supporting their families in contemporary society.
=> Answer: In contemporary society, parents face severe economic pressures driven by rising inflation, high living costs, and job insecurity. Providing quality education, healthcare, and housing often requires long working hours and personal sacrifices. When financial crises strike, parents frequently shoulder stress silently to protect their children from hardship. Societal safety nets and affordable public services are vital to supporting families and preventing economic distress from eroding family relationships.
b. Do you justify Monsieur Durand’s decision to commit suicide and arson for insurance money? Present arguments for and against his action.
Ans:
- •Arguments in Favor: Durand was trapped in an impossible situation with no social welfare or employment opportunities. His suicide and arson were a desperate, selfless act of love aimed at saving his young daughters from starvation and social ruin.
- •Arguments Against: From ethical and legal viewpoints, arson and insurance fraud are illegal acts. Taking his own life deprived his daughters of parental guidance and left them with psychological guilt and trauma, demonstrating that solving economic misery through self-destruction carries profound moral consequences.