L'Angoisse métaphysique dans Les Aveugles de Maeterlinck

Maeterlinck's play "Les Aveugles" reveals through a study of its various elements, the author's very personal metaphysical vision of the world. The story of the play is simple: twelve blind men and women are waiting for a priest. He brought them here and asked them to wait for him while he went to search for bread and water. He lies dead on the stage, but being blind they cannot see his body and therefore keep on waiting for his return. After they discover the body, they keep sitting and waiting, unable to do anything else. Through a use of elements of death and desolation – an old forest, an island surrounded by the sea, thorns, cold weather, funerary trees, characters dressed in dark colors – the play settles in an atmosphere of mystery and terror. With every additional element, with each new sentence being said, the fear increases. The dialogues with their use of impersonal phrases, their frequent unfinished sentences and the silences between the utterings, amplify the uneasiness. Unable to see, surrounded by mysteries, with no one to help them, these blind men represent the human endless search for understanding. There are more questions than answers in the play. (In French) (TH)