Tueur sans gages

The Killer (French title, Tueur sans gages) is a play written by Eugene Ionesco in 1958. It is the first of Ionesco's Bérenger plays. The others are Rhinocéros (1959), Exit the King (1962), and A Stroll in the Air (1963). In The Killer, Bérenger discovers an ideal "city of light", a common theme in many of his plays relating to a transcendant experience Ionesco had in his childhood. The elation he feels in the city of light is cut short by the discovery that the city is host to a killer who lures his victims to a drowning pool by offering to show them a "picture of the colonel". Bérenger leaves the city of light, spends much of the play tracking down the killer, and encounters the killer at the end of the play. In a long climactic speech typical of Bérenger and Ionesco in general, Bérenger tries to convince the killer that murdering is wrong, using multiple arguments and justifications, eventually coming to the conclusion that the only sensible thing to do is have the killer stab him to death. It's unclear whether Bérenger actually dies at the end of the play. He appears in several other plays, and it's unclear whether these occur before his death at the end of The Killer. Of course, factual contradiction is one of Ionesco's most common themes, and several other details about Bérenger contradict details in other plays (most glaringly perhaps being Exit the King, in which Bérenger is a dying king).