Halfway House ends at the same point where it began. Discuss.

Halfway House ends at the same point where it began. The play is about a search for meaning and identity. It can be viewed as an exploration of meaning and identity in the turmoil of changing social and familial structures. Although the play seeks to construct the search for identity within the unfulfilling, incomplete nature of bourgeois existence as a universal non-gendered experience along Existential lines as its primary concern, it eventually deals with many questions on a broader socio-economic context on realist lines. In the Prologue itself, the theme of exploration of identity is introduced, when ‘the Man in a Black Suit’ exclaims, “Who am I?” Immediately the declaration takes an Existential tangent as the fruitlessness of such a search for meaning is asserted with the speaker claiming, “This is a question I have given up trying to face.” He establishes the absurdity of identity by calling himself “amorphous” and “undefined”, as someone who like all of us puts on a new mask and gives a new meaning to himself for different occasions – “The fact is that there is something of me in each one of you and that is why, whether on or off stage, I have no separate identity.” He then asserts that no matter what the circumstance, what the situation and the gender, man’s search for identity and meaning in life would always remain an absurd, indescribable, undefined and irrational oddity. All the characters’ quest for an identity beyond the home, the search for an alternate sanctuary besides being analysed as a technique of Absurdist Theatre can also be seen in terms of the alienation that comes with urbanization, the breakdown of joint family and the new emerging power-plays and conflicts within the nuclear family with no viable support system outside. However, nobody find the meaning and it is the meaningless and futility that make the character realise their efforts. They may again go fors the search if they get the scope. Thus, the play ends where it began.

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