International Journal of Language & Linguistics

Outsiders in the Dramatic Works of John Millington Synge: In the Shadow of the Glen and the Well of the Saints
Sabah Atallah Khalifa Ali, Ph.D; Zaid Ibrahim Ismael, Ph.D.

Abstract
In times of wars, disasters, and famines, many people become victims of displacement, poverty, and social abnegation, living on the margin of the settled world. John Millington Synge’s plays are abundant with such nomadic figures, who are homeless and rarely come into contact with the stagnant bourgeois society, and when they do, they exit at the end of the plays, condemning the hypocrisy and the materialism of that sedentary community. The free life of Synge’s vagabonds is depicted as being superior to the restricted existence of the bourgeois world. These peripatetic characters possess a sensitive and poetic nature, acquired from their unrestricted life in the outdoors and the inspiration of the natural world. They serve the playwright in his criticism of the naiveté and the materiality of the bourgeois society. This research is a character study of these nomadic people, based on British thinker’s, Colin Wilson’s, philosophy of the outsider. It examines these characters in two of Synge’s plays, namely In the Shadow of the Glen (1903) andThe Well of the Saints (1905).

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