Recommendations
Books Like The Wild Duck
Best books to read after The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen
Readers who love The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen are drawn to its formal complexity, the central question of whether truth-telling is always beneficial, and the devastating tragedy of Hedvig's death — they want plays and novels that deal with the relationship between truth, illusion, and what people need to believe to survive, and with the consequences of idealism that refuses to acknowledge what those beliefs actually do for people.
- 1Buy
Hedda Gabler
by Henrik Ibsen
The later companion late Ibsen play — Hedda Tesman and the offstage shot. Companion late Ibsen plays organized around people destroyed by the gap between their aspirations and what their circumstances allow; The Wild Duck and Hedda Gabler both investigate what happens when what people want (truth; freedom) cannot be accommodated by what the world offers
- 2Buy
A Doll's House
by Henrik Ibsen
The earlier companion — Nora Helmer's departure. Together they show the range of Ibsen's treatment of truth: in A Doll's House, the revelation of truth leads toward liberation; in The Wild Duck, the revelation of truth leads directly to Hedvig's death
- 3Buy
The Cherry Orchard
by Anton Chekhov
The companion in the theatrical tradition of the play about characters who cannot save themselves because they are incapable of facing reality. Both are companion investigations of what happens to people when the fiction that sustains them is removed: where Chekhov's characters face their fate with a kind of elegiac acceptance, Ibsen's Hedvig pays the ultimate price
- 4Buy
Uncle Vanya
by Anton Chekhov
Chekhov's companion about people whose lives are organized around a sustaining illusion — Vanya's long years of service to Serebryakov and the devastating recognition that the service was wasted. Both The Wild Duck and Uncle Vanya are plays about the people who organize their lives around an illusion and what happens to them when the illusion is exposed
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The Iceman Cometh
by Eugene O'Neill
O'Neill's companion about the necessity of illusion — the regulars at Harry Hope's bar sustained by their pipe dreams, and Hickey's attempt to free them. The Iceman Cometh takes the same question as The Wild Duck to its logical extreme: O'Neill concludes, even more explicitly than Ibsen, that the pipe dreams are necessary for survival, and that removing them is not liberation but destruction
- 6Buy
The Glass Menagerie
by Tennessee Williams
Williams's companion in the tradition of the play organized around a fragile world of illusion and the outsider who threatens to shatter it. Both are organized around the question of what the truth would do to people who have constructed their lives around a carefully maintained fiction: Tom is the Gregers Werle who cannot leave without destroying the fragile world he's leaving behind
- 7Buy
Ghosts
by Henrik Ibsen
The companion Ibsen play showing the damage that the concealment of truth causes. Ghosts and The Wild Duck are companion investigations from opposite directions: Ghosts shows the damage that the concealment of truth causes; The Wild Duck shows the damage that the revelation of truth causes
- 8Buy
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Eliot's companion in the tradition of the investigation of idealism and its consequences. Both The Wild Duck and Middlemarch are organized around the collision between idealism (Gregers's 'claim of the ideal'; Dorothea's aspirations) and the reality of the lives in which that idealism operates: both conclude that idealism, without knowledge of what it will actually do to real people, can be more dangerous than the imperfect accommodations it seeks to replace
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