Recommendations
Books Like The Chairs
Best books to read after The Chairs by Eugène Ionesco
Readers who love The Chairs by Eugène Ionesco are drawn to its combination of the haunting image of accumulating empty chairs, the devastating ending in which the Orator cannot deliver the Message, and the investigation of the gap between the meaning we believe our lives to have and the possibility of transmitting it — they want plays and novels that deal with existential meaninglessness, the Theatre of the Absurd tradition, and the relationship between form and emptiness.
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The Bald Soprano
by Eugène Ionesco
The companion — the Smiths and the Martins and the collapse of language. The companion in Ionesco's earliest absurdist mode: where The Bald Soprano investigates the emptiness of social conversation, The Chairs investigates the emptiness of the meaning we hope a life will add up to
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Rhinoceros
by Eugène Ionesco
The companion organized around the townspeople turning into rhinoceroses. The companion investigation of the same absurdist mechanism with a more explicit political dimension: where The Chairs is a tragic farce about existential emptiness, Rhinoceros is a tragic farce about social conformity and totalitarianism
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Exit the King
by Eugène Ionesco
The companion organized around King Bérenger dying during the course of the play. The companion investigation of the same subject: the relationship between a life and its ending, the impossibility of dying well, the terror that the life you have lived will turn out to mean nothing
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Waiting for Godot
by Samuel Beckett
The companion in the Theatre of the Absurd tradition — Didi and Gogo waiting. The companion investigation of the relationship between the accumulation of time and the meaning that accumulation fails to produce
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Endgame
by Samuel Beckett
The companion at the end of the world — Hamm and Clov. The companion investigation of the relationship between ending and meaning: like The Chairs, Endgame is organized around figures who have accumulated a life and who cannot make sense of what it was for
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The Myth of Sisyphus
by Albert Camus
Camus's companion essay on the absurd. The companion philosophical text: what to do with the discovery that the meaning we hoped to transmit cannot be transmitted? Camus says to imagine Sisyphus happy; Ionesco's Old Man and Old Woman throw themselves out the window
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Being and Nothingness
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre's companion philosophical investigation of existence and meaning. The companion philosophical text: Ionesco's empty chairs dramatize what Sartre argues — that existence precedes essence and that we must create our own meaning or face the abyss
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The Lesson
by Eugène Ionesco
The companion Ionesco play — the Professor, the Student, and language as domination. The companion investigation of language from the other direction: The Chairs shows language as the vehicle of failed transmission; The Lesson shows language as the vehicle of successful domination
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