Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco: A Critical Analysis

Le Rhinoceros is the only play by Ionesco that makes an unequivocal statement.

The play ends on a heroic note but the implication is that there is not much hope for a human being in a

world of beasts.

Ionesco says, “Originally rhinoceritis was Nazism”.

Berenger is himself. He drinks too much. He has slovenly habits, and gives no signs of unusual intelligence.

But he has character. The others change with the times, following the current fashion, each for his own ends.

Botard is a Communist, Dudard an opportunist, Jean a conformist, Papillion a bureaucrat, and Daisy simply

a nice girl. They share no common ideology. What they have in common is the herd instinct. Berenger is a

petit bourgeois without ambition and without any special talent. But in one respect he is inflexible. He is not

a slave of the social order. Though he has a great desire to be like other people, he is incapable of

conforming. He represents humanity among the animals.

Daisy can afford her lover only a fleeting glimpse of heaven. Her proper habitat is the jungle along with the

rest of the beasts.

Berenger is a 20th century version of the romantic outcast of the 19 th century. He lacks the poetic halo of a

Byron or Shelley and has not even the messianic posture of a Strindberg. He is, nevertheless, the heir of the

romantic hero, and embodies the spirit of negation which an affirmation of man’s most precious attribute,

his freedom.

Ionesco detests ‘the reasoning play, constructed like a syllogism, in which the last scenes constitute the

logical conclusion of the introductory sense. He says,

“A play is a structure that consists of a series of states of consciousness or situations which become

intensified, grow more and more dense, then get entangled, either to be disentangled again or to end in

unbearable inextricability.”
In his plays language is reduced to a relatively minor role. In the theatre language is not an end in itself but

merely one element among many; the author can treat it freely. As Ionesco puts it,

“To give the theatre its true measure, the words themselves must be stretched to their utmost limits, the

language must be made almost to explode, or to destroy itself in its inability to contain its meaning.”

Of logic he says,

“Logic reveals itself in the illogicality of the absurd of which we have become aware.”

His theatre is directed against the fallacy that the fruits of human experience can be transmitted in the form

of pre-packed, neatly formulated conceptual pills. That is why his plays try to destroy the rationalistic

fallacy that language alone, language divorced from experience, can communicate human experience from

one person to another.

The technique used by Ionesco in Rhinoceros – Onstage metamorphosis.

Ionesco’s characters may be isolated and lonely in a metaphysical sense, but they are no means the tramps

and outcasts of Beckett and Adamov, and this increases the despair and absurdity of their isolation- they are

lonely inspite of being members of what ought to be an organic community.

The presence of companionship and family relationships lightens the despair of Ionesco’s world. It would be

wrong to regard his attitude as wholly pessimistic. He wants to make existence authentic, fully lived, by

putting man face to face with the harsh realities of the human condition. But this is also the way to

liberation. As Ionesco said once,

“To attack the absurdity of the human condition is a way of stating the possibility of non-absurdity…

Nothing makes me more pessimistic than the obligation not to be pessimistic.”

The very statement of the desperate situation constitutes a catharsis, a liberation.

His work constitutes a truly heroic attempt to break through the barriers of human communication.
The disease of rhinoceritis is the condemnation of the Nazi ideology. Not that the allusion is in any way

historical; Fascism is far from belonging exclusively to the past, it is very much a warning to be heeded here

and now. However critics have turned the play into an abstraction – a “universal parable” on the subject of

“conformism”.

One of the leitmotifs of Rhinoceros is the conflict between the ‘ideal of civilization’ and the ‘ideal of

nature’.

The picture of the progressive transformation of man into rhinoceros is a warning against the Fascist “appeal

to instinct.

The forces of social order which hold the stage together- the police, the civil service, the army- are the

highest incarnation of the principle of “logical necessity” as conceived by the bourgeois mind. But once the

illusion of logic has disintegrated, as in Ionesco’s view of the world it has, then nothing remains of these

forces but an empty shell.

Ours is a mutinied regiment of reasoners and logicians who exploit the illusion of logic to justify the

unjustifiable. However there is the danger that the same type of logical argument can be used to justify any

form of oppression, cruelty and exploitation (read Fascism). This ultimately is the theme to which Ionesco is

committed- the betrayal of man by his own intellect.

Rhinoceros is fundamentally an analysis of this betrayal. The problem is not “What is Fascism?” but “How

does a rational and civilized nation come to accept the Fascist ideal?”. And Ionesco’s answer is that,

accustomed to camouflage all reality behind the illusion of logic, the bourgeois mind has come to rely on

reason to supply an a posteriori justification for every event.

Berenger alone resists the general infatuation: his salvation lies in his positive acceptance of the irrational.

He alone, in his naivete, receives the facts for what they are instead of striving to demonstrate their “logical

necessity”.

In Rhinoceros, Ionesco pitilessly attacked cowardice and ‘running with the crowd’.