SOURCE: Hinson, Scott. “The ‘Other Funeral’: Narcissism and Symbolic Substitution in Marsha Norman's Traveler in the Dark.” In Marsha Norman: A Casebook, edited by Linda Ginter Brown, pp. 109-20. New York, N.Y.: Garland, 1996.

In the following essay, Hinson draws on Freudian psychoanalytic theory to argue that the characters in Traveler in the Dark are portrayed with remarkable depth and psychological realism.

Marsha Norman's Traveler in the Dark is frequently damned with faint praise. Critics write that her play is contrived and that action does not grow directly out of character or situation, but out of Norman's need to dramatize a philosophical and theological debate.¹ The most frequently cited criticism comes from Jack Kroll, who complains that “the action [in Traveler] seems whipped up under the lash of Norman's urgent need to dramatize a crisis of faith” (quoted in DLB Yearbook 311). Yet the same critics who damn her...