37 pages • 1 hour read
Martin McDonaghThe Pillowman
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Act IChapter Summaries & Analyses
Act I, Scene 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of murder (including child victims), graphic violence (including police brutality), child abuse, sexual abuse, and ableism.
The play opens in a police interrogation room where detectives Tupolski and Ariel introduce themselves to Katurian, a writer. Katurian does not know why he has been taken in for questioning, but he tells the officers that he will comply with them and answer any questions they have. Tupolski states outright that he and Ariel are adopting a “good cop, bad cop” technique. The two officers ask Katurian why he thinks he has been brought in for questioning, but Katurian is unable to come up with an answer. He says that he has never done anything “anti-state.” Ariel threatens to beat and torture Katurian, which only increases Katurian’s confusion. When Tupolski presses Katurian, Katurian says that he suspects they are interrogating him because of the stories he wrote, though he doesn’t know why the stories are of interest.
Katurian reveals that his full name is Katurian Katurian Katurian, noting that his “parents were funny people” (8). He also says that his closest living relative is his brother, Michal, who lives with him and has an intellectual disability. Katurian works at a slaughterhouse—his job there is not to “cut stuff” but only to “clear stuff” (9). The officers bring up one of Katurian’s stories called “The Little Apple Men,” remarking that its theme of child abuse is a common one among many of Katurian’s other stories. Trying to figure out the purpose of the interrogation, Katurian asks if the detectives are implying that the children in his stories are meant to represent “The People” at the hands of the state. In response, Ariel pulls Katurian by the hair and hits him in the face. Tupolski is annoyed by Ariel’s outburst and goes on to summarize Katurian’s story. In the story, a little girl carves little people out of apples and gives them to her father. Her father eats the apple figurines just to bother the girl, but the figurines are all full of razor blades, so the father dies a painful death. Later, some of the girl’s apple figurines come to life and, out of vengeance for causing the demise of their “brothers,” hold the girl’s mouth open and force her to swallow them so that she, too, dies in agony.
Ariel leaves the room, saying he’s going to question Katurian’s brother. Katurian is outraged, demanding that they let Michal go, since Michal is easily scared and has nothing to do with Katurian’s stories.
Tupolski summarizes another of Katurian’s stories called “The Three Gibbet Crossroads.” In this story, a man is left to starve in a cage for a crime he has committed but doesn’t remember. Across from him, there are two other cages with inmates. The cages are labeled “rapist” and “murderer.” The man can’t see what his own cage is labeled. As people pass by, they pray for the dead rapist and take pity on the murderer, but they are disgusted when they read the label on the man’s cage. The man begs someone to tell him what his crime is, but no one tells him. Eventually, he is shot to death without ever knowing his crime. Tupolski insists that Katurian’s stories are all metaphors, but Katurian insists that they don’t represent anything—he writes only for the sake of storytelling. Tupolski forces Katurian to read another story he wrote about a boy who has his toes cut off. Katurian hears his brother screaming in the other room, and Ariel reenters with a bloodied hand, presumably from beating Michal.
Tupolski and Ariel ask Katurian if he knows anything about two children who recently died. They bring out a box containing a child’s toes. Ariel tells Katurian that Michal already admitted to murdering three children and asks if Katurian knows anything about the third child who was killed. The detectives say they are going to execute Katurian and Michal. Confused and in disbelief, Katurian tells the officers that they must be framing him and Michal for murder because they have something against Katurian’s writing.
Act I, Scene 2 Summary
In a flashback, Katurian narrates his autobiographical story, “The Writer and the Writer’s Brother.” In the story, Katurian is a little boy who lives with his caring and affectionate parents. His parents give him anything he wants and encourage him to be creative, and young Katurian takes to writing stories. When Katurian is seven years old, he begins having nightmares in which he hears the sounds of electric drills and screaming. Katurian is disturbed, but his parents assure him that he has these nightmares only because he has a uniquely creative mind. Katurian becomes a better writer as time goes on, but his stories get stranger and darker due to the horrifying nightmares.
One day, someone slides a note written in blood under his bedroom door, and he breaks down the door to the other bedroom in his house. He finds that his parents were imitating the sounds of drills and a child’s screams, giving him nightmares on purpose to spur his creativity. Katurian learns to be thankful for what his parents put him through, as the “nightmares” made him a better writer. The family moves to a different house. Years later, Katurian revisits his childhood home and discovers the dead body of a boy in the other bedroom. The boy is holding a story written in blood. The story is better than any of Katurian’s, so he burns it and never mentions what he found to anyone.
The ending of “The Writer and the Writer’s Brother” is the only part of the story that isn’t true. Instead of finding a corpse, Katurian finds his brother alive. He realizes that his parents really had been torturing his brother for all these years to inspire Katurian’s writing. His brother (Michal) is severely brain damaged from the years of torture. Disgusted and appalled, Katurian suffocates and kills both his parents that night.
Act I Analysis
The argument between Katurian and the two detectives in the opening scene introduces the play’s most significant theme—The Moral Implications of Art. Katurian insists repeatedly that his stories contain no symbolism and thus have no bearing on any real-world events. Whether he believes this to be true in the moment or is only trying to avoid prosecution, the play makes clear that he is wrong. Though Katurian does not yet know this, his brother, Michal, has just re-enacted two of Katurian’s darkly twisted tales by actually murdering two young children, in exactly the gruesome ways Katurian describes in his stories. Katurian never intended to incite murder, but his intention doesn’t matter since the real-life consequences of his stories have already occurred. Katurian insists that his stories are “just stories” and that he writes them solely for the sake of storytelling. He claims to create art with no intention of affecting anyone or anything, but just because art is valuable in itself.
This insistence on art for art’s sake is a defensive posture in response to the totalitarian state in which he lives. If art exists in a vacuum, with no bearing on reality, then it need not fall under the state’s authority. Though Ariel and Tupolski—as representatives of the state—seem absurdly literal-minded in their theory of the link between Katurian’s stories and real-world violence, they are more clear-eyed than he is about Art as a Form of Resistance Against Authoritarianism: They understand that art has consequences that extend beyond its author’s intentions, and they recognize it as a threat to the state’s sole authority to define reality.
Because they are living in a highly censored police state, Katurian initially assumes that he’s being investigated for accidentally writing something anti-state, so he is horrified to learn that he is actually being accused of committing heinous crimes against children. Children form a motif that shows up throughout the play—Katurian writes about children, Michal murders children, and each of the adult characters is deeply affected by events occurring in their own childhoods. Notably, when Katurian protests the detectives torturing his brother, he twice yells out, “He’s just a child!” (18). Michal is an adult, but his intellectual disability means that he sometimes thinks in childlike ways. Michal is in fact older than Katurian, but Katurian cares for him as a younger brother, or even his own child.
The story Katurian reads to the detectives about the boy whose toes are cut off is called “The Tale of the Town on the River,” which Katurian says is his best story. It is a twist on an actual classic story from the Middle Ages called The Pied Piper of Hamelin. In the old folk tale, a piper is hired to come to a town to drive out all the rats with the sound of his piping. After the piper does his job, the townspeople refuse to pay him what they promised. Seeking revenge, the piper uses his pipe to drive out all the town’s children as well, and the children are never seen again. Only a few children stay in town, including one who can’t walk.
Katurian’s story is like a prequel to the classic version—in his story, the piper is on his way to town, carrying empty boxes that smell like animals. On his way, he meets a kind young boy. Wanting to do the boy a favor, the piper cuts off all his toes. Katurian’s idea is that this boy ends up being the child who can’t walk and thus isn’t driven out of town with the others. More importantly, the piper was carrying rats into the town on purpose. Katurian explains to Tupolski, “It’s the children the Pied Piper was after. […] He brought the rats. He knew the townspeople wouldn’t pay. It was the children he was after in the first place” (17).
The story of the piper serves as an allegory in The Pillowman. The townspeople’s greed ends up costing them their children, just as so many adults in the play fail the children around them due to their own selfishness. Katurian’s version of the story makes the piper out to be even more sadistic toward children. Again, many adults in the play reflect this attitude—Michal and Katurian’s parents torture their son merely as a social experiment, and (the play later reveals) Ariel’s father sexually abuses him for his own pleasure. Overall, using the two versions of The Pied Piper illustrates the many ways in which society neglects children due to selfishness.
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By Martin McDonagh
