Edward Albee’s Supreme Fictions: A Stevensian Analysis of The Sandbox and The American Dream

Abstract

Drawing on Wallace Stevens’s ideas of Supreme Fiction, this research aims to prove that Albee’s plays are a form of supreme fiction which adopts deviant or unreal ways to depict the real. The primary texts used in this research are The Sandbox and The American Dream. In “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction”, Stevens gives us an inexhaustible pool of fiction available to mankind by way of which the real can be accessed. Just as the roaring of ‘the lion’, ‘buzzing of bees, composing of ‘music’, and making of sculptures are various expressions (Stevens, 1942)—amidst others—of a single idea, Theatre of the Absurd is also an expression of a creative imagination that seeks ways to channel its creative outpour in socially expressible ways. The paper also maintains that the darkly comic mode, the grotesquely caricatured characters, and the absurd situations are sublimated versions of the real. This invented mode of expression is the writer’s method of expressing the inexpressible.