Any mature understanding of violence and pacifism must begin with an acknowledgement of the violence in one's own heart, and in A Sleep of Prisoners … Fry had defined the progression from the recognition of violence within to a complete pacifism. That play begins with the personal violence of Cain and Abel, moves through the political assassination of Absalom by Joab but condoned by David, progresses to the sacrificial offering of Isaac by Abraham, and concludes with Daniel's friends in the fiery furnace, the flames being the inescapable violence of the human condition, which the pacifist must learn to endure without being violent in return.

Although The Dark is Light Enough is three years later than Sleep, no other play intervened, and this paper assumes that Fry's perceptions of violence and pacifism remained constant during the interim. The chief difference between the plays is the surrealistic, lyrical organization of...