Recommendations
Books Like The Visit
Best books to read after The Visit by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Readers who love The Visit by Friedrich Dürrenmatt are drawn to its combination of dark comedy precision, the mechanism by which an entire community becomes complicit in murder, and the investigation of the relationship between economic calculation and moral judgment — they want plays and novels that deal with the parable form, the Brechtian tradition of the dark political comedy, and the encounter between economic power and human dignity.
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The Physicists
by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Dürrenmatt's companion dark comedy — physicists in a psychiatric clinic. The companion investigation of the same dark comic mechanism: a situation that appears to have a moral solution but is organized so that no moral solution is possible
- 2Buy
The Good Person of Setzuan
by Bertolt Brecht
Brecht's companion parable play about the impossibility of being good in an economic system that punishes goodness. The companion Brechtian investigation: what happens when the economic logic of a situation is incompatible with moral behavior?
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Mother Courage and Her Children
by Bertolt Brecht
Brecht's companion parable about the impossibility of profiting from war without losing everything. The companion investigation of the economic logic that governs human behavior: Mother Courage and Clara Zachanassian are companion figures, both women who have learned to survive through ruthlessness
- 4Buy
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
by Bertolt Brecht
Brecht's companion parable about the rise of a Hitler-figure in the Chicago cauliflower trade. The companion investigation of the mechanism by which an entire community becomes complicit in evil: in The Visit, Güllen's complicity is economic; in Arturo Ui, the merchants' complicity is also economic and follows the same inevitable logic
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The Price
by Arthur Miller
Miller's companion play about two brothers arguing over the value of their dead father's furniture. The companion investigation of the relationship between price (economic value) and worth (moral value), and the way that economic calculation crowds out moral judgment
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The Master Builder
by Henrik Ibsen
Ibsen's companion investigation of an arriving woman who disturbs an established household. Clara Zachanassian's return to Güllen is the dark inversion of Hilde Wangel's arrival: both are women from the past who arrive to settle accounts, but where Hilde's demand is for the impossible, Clara's demand is for the all-too-possible
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An Inspector Calls
by J.B. Priestley
Priestley's companion dark parable about a bourgeois family whose comfortable complacency is dismantled by an inspector who reveals their moral complicity in a young woman's death. The companion investigation of collective complicity: in An Inspector Calls, moral responsibility is divided across a family; in The Visit, it is distributed across an entire community
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Rhinoceros
by Eugène Ionesco
Ionesco's companion absurdist investigation of mass conformity — the townspeople of a small French town gradually turning into rhinoceroses. The companion investigation of how a community is transformed by a collective movement that no individual seems to have chosen: in The Visit, the town chooses murder by economic logic; in Rhinoceros, the town chooses conformity by social logic
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