The Public Literary Elements

Tragedy

The play was written in Spanish but was later translated into English.

The action of the play takes place inside the Director's home.

Because this a play, there is no narrator. Instead, each character presents the events they are experiencing from a first-person subjective point of view through their dialogues.

The tone used in the play is a violent and confused one.

The protagonist is the Director and the antagonists are the characters who try to hurt him.

The major conflict is between reality and expectations.

The play reaches the climax when the audience realizes that the Director is not really the director and that another character is pulling the strings.

The chaotic way in which the Director is presented in the beginning of the play foreshadows the later violence which will be described.

One of the main understatements in the play is the way in which the Director sees himself as being the calmest among his companions. This is later proven to be an understatement when all the characters describe him as being chaotic and unreliable.

The main allusion in the play is the idea that everyone is pretending to be someone else and that no one is true to themselves.

One of the most images is the one in which every character gets undress only to be revealed that under their clothes, is another set of completely different clothes. This image is important because it transmits the idea that the reader should not believe anything the characters are claiming.

A paradoxical idea is a way in which the horses, even though they are established as being the most powerful, all die at the end of the play.

N/A

We find a personification in the line "and the walls were closing in and screaming at him to go".

The author used in this play stage directions to describe the place where the action is taking place as well as a description of the characters. Aside is also used as a way of expressing a person's inner feelings and true beliefs.