Critical Essay | Johan Callens

Johan Callens

SOURCE: "Memories of The Sea in Shepard's Illinois," in Modern Drama, Vol. XXIX, No. 3, September, 1986, pp. 403-15.

In the following essay, Callens assesses the underlying "mythic-symbolic dimension" of Sam Shepard's drama Buried Child, focusing on the complex and ambivalent water symbolism in the play.

Truly landlocked people know they are. Know the occasional Bitter Creek or Powder River that runs through Wyoming; that the large tidy Salt Lake of Utah is all they have of the sea and that they must content themselves with bank, shore, and beach because they cannot claim a coast. And having none, seldom dream of flight. But the people living in the Great Lakes region are confused by their place on the country's edge—an edge that is border but not coast. They seem to be able to live a long time believing, as coastal people do, that they are at the frontier...
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