Wild Duck Journal #3

A dramatist often creates a gap between what the audience knows and what the characters know. With reference to at least two plays, discuss how and to what effect dramatists have used this technique.

In Wild Duck, it seems that the characters know more information than the reader does, regarding their past and backgrounds especially. Ibsen has created a sense of ambiquity by purposefully leaving details out. For example, in Act 1, Ibsen shares little information about the scandal that Ekdal and Werle were involoved in. Hjalmar says when speaking to Gregers: "They were such very different circumstances I found myself in. But then everything else was so different, too. That immense, shattering misfortune for Father - the shame and scandal" (Ibsen 123). Here, Ibsen does not tell give away much about the scandal, leaving the reader to wonder what happened. By doing so, Ibsen forces the reader to make connections of their own to the context of the play and try to discover for themselves what the two men might be referring to. By using the characters to withhold information, Ibsen helps to build them up as characters as well. From this passage, we see Hjalmar's unwillingness to go into detail, which makes the reader wonder if he feels ashamed or embarrassed.
In Act 3 of Wild Duck, Ibsen once again uses Hjalmar to withhold information from the audience. This time the ambiguity appears when he is briefly telling Gregers about his invention, and Gregers asks: "And what does this invention consist of? What's its purpose?" (Ibsen 168). To this, Hjalmar answers: "Yes, Gregers, you musn't ask for details like that yet" (Ibsen 168). By not telling the reader (or Gregers) what his invention is, Hjalmar causes us to wonder what it is and why it is so important to his future. It seems that the other characters know what it is, like Hedvig and Gina, so that leaves the reader to wonder why the audience and Gregers cannot know. The one reason that I can think of for this is if it is an invention that Gregers will not like for some reason, or something that will hurt him or his father. but anyway, once again Ibsen has chosen to withhold certain information from the audience to inspire them to think of what it could possibly be.
Opposite to Wild Duck, in Oedipus The King, Sophocles gives the audience more knowledge about what's going on than the characters themselves. From the beginning of the play when Oedipus' prophecy is mentioned ("Revealed at last, brother and father both/ to the children he embraces, to his mother/ son and husband both - he sowed the loins/ his father sowed, he spilled his father's blood!" [Sopohocles 520-526] ), the reader can clearly see that Oedipus is the murderer of Laius, his father, and is the son of Jocasta, his wife. Since the reader goes on throughout the rest of the story knowing what the characters will soon discover, there is less suspense. Also, because the audience has been set up to know more than the characters, the technique of dramatic irony has been created. This dramatic irony makes the tragedy more enjoyable to the reader, because although they already know what is going to happen, they have to wait and see how the characters will react.