A reader who reads Albee will not fail to notice the tricks of language at work; a more interesting analysis is to consider how the characters themselves are aware of language, of reading and being read, as text, by other characters. Albee's plays, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and “Three Tall Women,” show the obsession with language and its functions, both good and terrifying. "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" it is as much about censorship, attempts to limit speech, as it is about acting and generation through language. Three Tall Women, as a memory game, exposes language as a primary form of discovery. In both works, characters use language in ways that may start out light-hearted but never meaningless. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, to begin with, takes its title from a play on words, apparently of little significance, unless we read it as an inversion of the traditional children's fairy tale and recognize that a female has replaced the male monster. But if we accept the idea of ​​wordplay as a betrayal of the hidden desire of words, then we are thrown into a world where every verbal choice matters whether we understand it or not. Indeed, upon entering the house with George and Martha, we enter this very world, and the play on words begins instantaneously and inexorably. A vaguely remembered and unanchored phrase enters Martha's mind. What a dump! and he will not rest, nor let George rest, until he locates him in time and place (3). A conflict immediately arises based on how each perceives the other's mode of communication in the party from which one is returning. Martha accuses George of passivity, of sitting around talking instead of mingling, and George retorts: Do you want me to go around all night braying at everyone, like you do? (7). After a few more pages of verbal exchange, the guests arrive, catapulted into George and Martha's world in much the same way we are. The jokes continue unabated, and when George tries to ease Nick, Honey, and the audience into the exchange with the part, Martha is a devil with language; it really is, we're starting to understand what the theme of the evening will be (21st). The grueling Act I of Virginia Woolf's Who's Afraid?, entitled Fun and Games, gives us a peak at the range of language. There are common, unspectacular but utilitarian aphorisms and phrases, such as Honey's Never mix never aware (23) and Martha's bust a gut (25), as well as confusing expressions that perhaps sound familiar due to the rhythm but are in reality pure invention of the character. , like that of George For the blind eye of the mind, the tranquility of the heart and the goiter of the liver (24). The characters are always searching for the right phrase, testing the possibilities out loud in an attempt to match the meaning to the language. Thus, we have George's image of Martha chewing on ice cubes like a cocker spaniel (14) and Martha's more damaging non-image of George as a blank space, a digit... a zero (17). Connected to this desire for successful representation is a distaste for those who treat language half-heartedly. George ridicules Nick for his attempt to characterize an abstract painting by offering it various interchangeable voids, a certain loud, relaxed quality or a quietly loud relaxed intensity (22), as he later mocks Honey for reducing the toilet to a euphemism ( 29). Conventional values ​​expressed in polite speeches have no place in the order of this night, which will end with the characters whothey will go down not only to the bone, but beyond the bone to the marrow (213). In Act I, George tries to assure Nick that nothing out of the ordinary is happening. We are simply walking on what remains of our wits, she tells him (34). But once it's revealed that Martha told Honey about the couple's child, the games quickly turn ugly, extending into the second act. As each character exposes secrets known only to him or herself, or shared only with their spouse, and as characters enter and exit rooms on stage so that the set-up constantly changes, the audience becomes confused about who knows what. at every point in the game. For example, the stories of George and Martha's boxing match and Martha's first lover are told to all four characters, but the stories of George at primary school and Nick's marriage to Honey are only exchanged by George and Nick. This sets the stage for the final, climatic asymmetry of knowledge that George killed George and Honey's shared son, much to Honey's terror. This, the perfect achievement of the play with language in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, gloriously closes an unsatisfying evening of wordplay. The uses of language discussed so far, to hurt or to reveal or to relate, are unsatisfactory for two reasons. In the first act, George says to Nick, "I'm sorry." I wasn't listening... or thinking... whatever the case may be (46). This is similar to Nick in act two when he says to George, I heard you…I didn't say I was deaf…I said I didn't understand (98). As Albee makes clear throughout the work, listening is not thinking, and listening is not understanding. The character's dissatisfaction with language takes shape as repeated examples of correct speech throughout the play. Has there ever been a play in which the characters corrected each other so insistently and for such a non-functional purpose? There's George and Martha arguing about abstruse and abstract (63), the group of geese corrected as gangle and finally as gaggle (113), and Honey's correction of George when he says the doorbell rang, didn't ring, which exasperatingly prolongs the tension before the watershed (229). The characters, I think, attempt to assert this small measure of control over speech because they fail in larger ways, in their attempts to censor the speech of others when it matters. In Act III, Martha tells George, Truth and Illusion. .you don't know the difference, to which George replies: No; but we must continue as if we had done so (202). The failure of language could be the final message of the play, but it is not, for George has prepared a final game to end all games. He says to Martha: Now listen to me... We're moving forward, and I'm going to attack you, and make your performance tonight look like an Easter show. Now I want you to get a little alert. (Slaps her lightly with his free hand) I want some life in you, darling. (208)This seems like a rather gentle and almost human conduct from Martha in the ring, which follows what we saw before. George is telling Martha: Please be at the top of your game, because I'm going to need you. What George imagined will follow is an entirely new and powerful use of language. This coincides with his transition from a man of contemplation, historian, to a man of action, biologist, in line with the human organization of the work. As George says earlier, when people can't stand the present, they do one of two things, either they turn to contemplating the past, as I did, or they set about changing the future (178). At the end of the play, both George and Martha realize that their incessant play with language keeps them trapped in a presentclaustrophobic and unbearable. Therefore, when George kills his son to close the work, he is activating the original scriptural function of language, the logos, in reverse. Rather than creating through words, George's act is one of dismantling. So when he tells Martha, I'm not a god. I have no power over life and death, he is a bit shy (233). George removes the fundamental lie in their relationship with others and with each other through another lie, and thus creates space for a new world in which the two of them will no longer have to behave as if they know the difference between truth and illusion. Either they will know the difference in the most promising reading or they will recognize their human limitations and not add to the darkness. Over the course of the play, the characters adopt language across a range of functions, but it is only the latter that is purposeful and therefore satisfying. Like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Albee's next work, Three Tall Women, betrays an obsession with the language exchanged between people. The work is divided, although not in an orderly manner, into two acts, each with its primary function achieved through language. In Act I, Albee aims to individualize or differentiate the three women A, B and C, dividing them into roles that are largely economic but also biologically dependent, in which each character's existence feeds on that of a other (A as the needy old lady, B as the caretaker and C as the lawyer's representative). In Act II, on the contrary, the three women undergo a form of condensation or compression into one, and the basic asymmetry of knowledge (C does not know that she is the same woman as B and A), as in Who's afraid by Virginia Woolf?, gradually disappears. However, the boundaries between the acts are not entirely rigid. Verbal clues begin to penetrate the reader's consciousness right from the start, at the same time that C begins to realize what she has gotten herself into. When C says in Act I, There's nothing wrong with me, B responds, with a sour smile, Well, just wait (18). This is the first warning in the play, and although it can be understood in its direct meaning that with age the compliant C will no longer be so, it also sets the stage for more ambiguous statements, as when A tells B, She will. Learn. (AC; threatening.) That's not true (24). This suggests that there is something that C will have to discover, through careful listening, careful remembering, and a synthesis of the two. Albee suggests the secret to us at the beginning of the play, even though we are not sufficiently educated as to its meaning at this point. linguistic models operating in the work and are therefore unable to grasp the nature of the enigma. This is, as in Oedipus Rex, an enigma of identity. In an exchange that shows Albee in full control of his talents, A crawls into the room after being abandoned in the bathroom and laments, A person could die in there and no one would care, transferring the emotion to a disembodied third person in order to generate feelings of guilt without appearing to ask for it (14). C gets the point, so he mocks her for her circumlocution: C (To herself, but to be heard.) Who is this… person? A person could do this, a person could do...WIT's a figure of speech.C(Slightly sarcastic.) No. Really?B(He can't.) That's what they tell me. (15)The joke works on many levels. C not only jokes about A, but also about B. In the end, however, the joke is on C, because she is, like every other character, the answer to his question: who is this person? In Act II of Three Tall Women, the carefully written roles begin to fall apart. The disembodied third-person mannequin that A foreshadowed in the first act lies on the bed, and B and C enter the stage opposite their exits at the end of the first,.