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영어

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the absent characters in Eugene O’Neill’s Before Breakfast and Susan Glaspell’s Trifles, and find out their dramaturgic importance. These two plays are regarded as a pair because they have interesting similarities. The use of absent characters is one of the similarities. Absent characters exercise great effects on these two plays. They remain in the offstage, but they dominate the whole play as much as any onstage characters. In this paper, the absent characters are being analysed in the aspects of the following three categories: the establishment; the effects on onstage figures and plot; and the effects on the themes. (Kyungnam University)