Violence occurs as a daily human action all over the world; it may cause so many kinds of damage to individuals as well as to society: physical, psychological, or both. Many literary authors of different genres have tried their best to portray violence by showing its negative effects, especially playwrights because they have the chance to show people the dangers of violence through performance on stage to warn them against such negatively affected action. It has been a human action since the beginning of human life on this planet when the first crime happened on earth when Cane killed his brother Abel. In our modern world, people are witnessing daily violent actions as a result of destructive wars that turned the humans into brutal beings. This paper deals with violence as it occurred as a result of the atrocities of wars in two different societies during the same period of the 1990s: A European country (probably Bosnia or Britain), as reflected in Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995), and Iraqi, as shown by Ali Abdulnebi Al Zaidi’s Fourth Generation (1997). Although violence takes different shapes, still it has the same destructive effects on the life of people who are involved in. The researcher tries to show how both writers have staged violence during the performances of their plays.
Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (1961) clearly portrays a lack of communication among the characters of the play which refers to the condition of modern man. This failure of communication led Samuel Beckett to use a lot of pauses and silences in all plays written instead of using words. To express the bewilderment of the modern man during the 20th century, Beckett adopts the use of no language strategy in the dramatic works. After World War II, people were without hope, religion, food, jobs, homes, or even countries. Beckett gave them a voice. He used a dramatic language out of everyday things, in which silence was part of the syntax as a poetic repetition. Language is no more important to the modern man; instead, he used silence to express his feelings. For him, silence is more powerful than the words themselves. That’s why; long and short pauses can be seen throughout all Beckett’s plays. In this play, the characters chose not to communicate; instead, they kept silent because they failed to interact with each other or even with themselves. The nature of this study is qualitative and objective; it textually analyzes the text to show the state of the modern man during 20th century. As a conclusion, one can say that Beckett’s use of pauses and silences was to express the bewilderment of the modern man and the inner conflict inside of him. Moreover, the modern man has lost his communication with other people as a result of that conflict.
After World War II, postmodernism began to rise as a movement and so many novelists began using a non-linear style, which involved the use of techniques like: shift in time, stream of consciousness, interior monologues, juxtapositions, … etc. The readers felt lost in the sense that they cannot grasp the meaning easily because the narrative is not sequential. Time shifts in the novel from the present to the past and to the future. However, it is only through a close reading that readers can differentiate between the frame story and the story within. Kurt Vonnegut (1922Vonnegut ( -2017 is one of those postmodernist American writers who used postmodernist elements clearly in this novel which reflect the fragmentation of modern western culture: fragmentation of time, space, language, and human subject. In his novel Slaughterhouse Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-dance with Death (1969) he uses a humorous style to satirize authorities as well as society. The novels tackles the atrocities of war and the bombing of Dresden because Vonnegut was a true witness of that event. He was part of the cruel experience of World War II where he was captured and taken as a prisoner. Vonnegut's fiction reflects the literary, philosophical, and social tendencies of the late twentieth century. His anti-realistic novels represent a guide in the postmodern period in American literature. The most important thing in his novels is the old question of free will and the meaning of life, death, and love. The paper is concerned with
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