The Visit

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1956

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Act Summaries & Analyses

Act I

Act II

Act III

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Coffin and the Black Panther

Claire travels with “an elaborate black coffin,” which she casually tells the Mayor she “may need” (24). The coffin is carried to the hotel with Claire’s mountain of luggage, comical at first, but becoming more macabre once it’s clear that the coffin is for Ill. The specter of the coffin looms large over the action, always asking the question as to when and how it will be filled. Claire has prepared Ill’s coffin and his mausoleum in Capri because it’s easier for her to think of Ill as “a dead love in [her] memory, a gentle ghost haunting the wreckage of a house” (89) rather than the man who broke her heart and callously destroyed her life. Claire creates a conflation between weddings and funerals. Each day, she brings in more flowers and wreaths, either to decorate the coffin or for her elaborate wedding. Roby and Toby adorn the coffin with the flowers that arrive. It’s a threat, but it is also a promise of death. Ill’s funeral is already happening, and he just needs to show up. Claire’s weddings aren’t the beginning of a couple’s life together, but the start of the ticking timer counting down the end of the relationship, which will occur abruptly and without warning, much like death. Ill calls Claire his “little sorceress” (20), and the Schoolteacher calls her “an avenging Greek goddess” (26). The coffin is a magic spell or a morbid joke, demanding to be occupied before the play is over. It’s a cage, waiting to contain Ill and keep him trapped forever. She describes Ill’s waiting tomb as beautiful and peaceful, near the Mediterranean Ocean in a place he has never been. Of course, he won’t be able to appreciate it.

Similarly, the panther, black like the coffin, is like a sorceress’s hex on Ill. Claire seems surprised to learn that the cat escaped, but whether or not she set it free herself, the panther brings Ill closer to his own death. Like the coffin, which is absurdly unsubtle, the black panther is a comically obvious representation of Ill. Claire’s pet name for Ill was “black panther,” and the unseen cat is sleek and wild like Ill was when he was younger but is no longer. Claire wants Ill dead because in death, he is ageless. She believes that possessing his body and laying it to rest will allow her to rewrite history, another sorceress’s spell. When the panther escapes, the men of the town rehearse for the future murder of Ill. They are immediately aggressive and excessively bloodthirsty, arming themselves with far more guns than necessary. Although the townspeople will strangle Ill, not shoot him, killing the panther is both a threat to Ill and a blunt foreshadowing of Ill’s death. As Ill, fearing for his life, seeks help and protection from the Policeman, the Mayor, and the Priest, all three have guns that are subtly (or not so subtly) intimidating. When the panther is hunted down, the townspeople lay the animal’s dead body in front of Ill’s shop. The men of Guellen demonstrate that they want to kill Ill, even as they claim that they don’t. When Ill is dead, Claire looks at him and sees him as her black panther again. She leaves with his coffin, making her way to the train station to spend the rest of her life with him, turning his death into the wedding he denied her.

Guellen

The literal translation for the word “güllen” (spelled “Guellen” for this translation but “Güllen” in the original) is “manure.” The fictional town is often presumed to be in Switzerland, but Friedrich Dürrenmatt states that it is “somewhere in Central Europe” (105). Ten years after World War II, the rest of the country is booming, but Guellen is broke. The trains that once stopped there whiz by, and the majority of the populace is unemployed while Guellen’s foundry and factories remain shut down. The Guellen men who sit at the train station at the beginning of the play blame the Free Masons, the Jews, High Finance, and International Communism for whatever conspiracy is keeping the town in poverty, mirroring the scapegoating by the Nazis that built up to the genocide of the Jews. It’s almost as if the town is cursed. But of course, later it becomes apparent that there is no curse—just one incredibly wealthy old lady who is manufacturing their predicament for the sake of settling an old score. For many of the inhabitants, Guellen is the entire world. This is the case for Ill, who was born and raised in Guellen and only ventured outside the town two or three times. This makes Claire’s visit a monumental event. And saving the town is the only option, as the citizens can’t imagine (or can’t afford) relocating somewhere prosperous. Even Ill, faced with his own murder, cannot bring himself to leave. The insularity of small-town politics makes it possible for Guellen to carry out the murder and frame it as justice. The reward of personal wealth makes everyone in town complicit, and equally invested in keeping up the secret and the lie.

The townspeople speak fondly about what the town once was. They claim that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe spent the night there, that Johannes Brahms wrote a quartet there, and that the town was once an arts center. They repeat that they live by Humanist values, even as they are closing in on Ill and clearly considering killing him. Certainly, the town once had more money, but did they have more principles? Their treatment of Claire at 17 would suggest that their professed Humanist values only apply to certain humans. And 45 years later, the way they talk about Louisa, a young woman whom the townspeople gossip about derisively, suggests that their treatment of women hasn’t changed. The townspeople have constructed a virtuous façade for the town, and the Mayor talks about “public spirit” and “love for your native town” (81) in his bid to convince Ill to kill himself, but in the end, Guellen is manure.

At the beginning of the play, they are in such dire straits that they have sold the town’s history museum to the Americans. This is a funny bit of comedy, a humorously ridiculous proposition, but it also suggests that the town has no sense of history. Claire’s money allows them to rebuild the town and become a bustling city again, but their prosperity is built on something rotten. The play comments that prosperity is often built on atrocity, and the erasure and revision of history allows it to continue without accountability. Claire’s proposition to the town does more than exact vengeance on her old lover. She could have easily had Ill tortured or killed at any time. But her vengeance includes the townspeople who mocked her and forced her out as a pregnant teen. She sets out to make them culpable for killing someone whom they supposedly loved, watching them turn into murderers and revise their entire sense of right and wrong for the sake of money.

The Old Lady Who Visits

The Schoolmaster, realizing that Ill’s murder is inevitable and that it is also inevitable that he will take part in it, states, “I know that one day an old lady will come for us too, and then what happened to you will also happen to us” (77). When Claire was 17 and Ill was 20, Ill destroyed her life. She loved him and she was pregnant, and he callously betrayed her. She had no choice but to become a sex worker to survive. Certainly, this story or similar has happened countless times throughout history. Ill lived 45 more years, had two children, and built a life before his cruelty came back to haunt him. When Claire arrives, he is well-loved and on the cusp of becoming mayor. He flirts with Claire, having conveniently forgotten the harm he caused her. Likewise, the town has forgotten entirely the circumstances of Claire’s ousting, believing that Guellen is entitled to her money. The old lady who has come for Ill is a grotesque and vengeful creature of his own making. Most of her body has been damaged and replaced by artificial parts, and she no longer has any softness for human feeling or love. She calls herself unkillable, which seems unlikely in a literal sense, but true as she functions within the play. To Claire, everything is for sale, and she has the money to buy it, whether it’s husbands or her own version of justice. Dürrenmatt describes her as a woman who has the money to descend on the people who harmed her like a tragic Greek heroine, comparing her to Medea, who murdered her own children as revenge for her husband’s infidelity. Claire is funny and often charming, but she is also brutal and had two men blinded and castrated as payback for their perjury. Claire may be mortal, but she has made herself into a god by virtue of her money. She strikes Guellen and Ill at the exact right moment to persuade the townspeople to carry out murder and convince themselves that it was a necessary act of justice.

The Schoolmaster’s terror that his own old lady will come for him echoes the anxieties of post-World War II Europe, as many people questioned what would happen to those who collaborated with the Nazis for self-preservation or simply looked the other way as atrocities happened in front of them. In particular, Dürrenmatt was critical of Switzerland’s policy of neutrality, which in many instances meant cooperation, especially for financial gain. The play mirrors this in Guellen’s leaders and townspeople. Ill’s visiting old lady takes away their ability to see, or at least she gives them an incentive to pretend that they don’t. The Policeman, the Mayor, and the Priest all turn Ill away when he asks for help, denying that there is any threat at all. The Mayor, as his new typewriter is delivered, denies that the townspeople are experiencing any boost in their quality of life. The townspeople are looking the other way by pretending that their increase in extended credit won’t be repaid with Ill’s death. Even as the townspeople become aggressive toward Ill, they actively deny what they’re doing. Ill’s torment is that they refuse to see and acknowledge their behavior, treating him as if he is going mad. But for all their plausible deniability and artifice of innocence, Claire’s demand and Ill’s refusal to kill himself force the townspeople to murder him with their own hands. They cannot deny that they actively killed him, and although they cover the killing for the sake of the press, their own guilt is the truth that they must live with. They are not evil people, but normal people who give in to temptation because of oppressive poverty. Therefore, their own old ladies might come in the form of tormenting ghosts or perhaps a divine punishment for giving in to greed at the cost of humanity.