37 pages • 1-hour read
The Pillowman
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Themes
The Moral Implications of Art
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of murder (including child victims), suicide, child abuse (including sexual abuse), ableism, religious and racial discrimination, graphic violence (including police brutality), substance abuse, mental illness, and offensive language (including profanity).
The Pillowman confronts ethical questions about the relationship between art and reality, asking whether art can be held responsible for human suffering in the real world and, conversely, whether it can be credited with alleviating that suffering. The play explores this topic to uncomfortable extremes—in the process uncovering many questions whose answers remain ambiguous—but ultimately, it proposes that art can negatively affect society and human behavior while advocating for the inherent value of all art, regardless of its real-world effects. The play opens with two police detectives interrogating Katurian about his writing, as two recent murders were clearly based on fictional events in Katurian’s stories. The detectives argue that the stories are “pointers” and that everything in them is meant to symbolize or represent something in the real world. Katurian, on the other hand, insists that “[t]he only duty of a storyteller is to tell a story” (8). He reiterates repeatedly that his writing has no connection at all to real-life events. Even though he believes this at the time, it turns out not to be true. Michal really did murder two children because he thought Katurian “told [him] to” (34) through his stories. Katurian must confront the truth that his art does have real-world consequences, regardless of his intentions.
Katurian’s stories are exceptionally dark and grotesque, often containing graphic descriptions of child abuse and death. The other characters in the play take issue with this, even aside from the crimes the fiction ends up inspiring. After Katurian tells Detective Tupolski one of his stories in full, Tupolski sarcastically responds, “No, there’s nothing wrong with that story. There’s nothing in that story you would say the person who wrote this story is a sick fucking scummy cunt” (15). The officers intend to burn the stories due to their content, and ironically, even Michal agrees that they should be burned, as “some of ‘em are a bit sick, really” (42). Katurian, on the other hand, is so strongly committed to preserving them that he literally sacrifices his life for them. He ends up being executed on the condition that the detectives keep his stories intact and eventually re-release them. Even though it becomes undeniable that the stories have had negative impacts in the real world, Katurian believes that their value exists independently of these consequences. This suggests a viewpoint that fiction, and art in general, has an intrinsic value and right to exist regardless of what negative emotions or heinous actions it might incite.
Art as a Form of Resistance Against Authoritarianism
Though The Pillowman’s dialogue does not focus on its political backdrop, its narrative is shaped by the fictional totalitarian police state in which it is set. The dynamic between authority and individuals in the play underscores the danger of censorship as an abuse of power. When the detectives open their interrogation, Katurian assumes they are going to accuse him of threatening the state. He explains his confusion over being brought in for questioning, saying, “I’ve never done any anti-police thing, I’ve never done any anti-state thing” (7). The question of whether Katurian’s writing constitutes an “anti-state thing” is less straightforward than this blanket denial suggests. Katurian believes that his work has value strictly as art, independent of its connection to the real world. The function of Ariel and Tupolski, as emissaries of the state, is to convince him otherwise. In their view, everything exists in relation to the state. The fact that Katurian is actually under investigation (and eventually executed) for his writing, which is not directly threatening to the state’s order, highlights how insidiously controlling unchecked authority can become.
Tupolski and Ariel, official detectives who represent the government, torture and abuse both Katurian and Michal during their interrogations. They verbally intimidate and physically beat them, and they even electrocute Katurian. Their tactics become more aggressive throughout the play, including after they learn that Michal is mentally disabled and that Katurian didn’t commit the murders—two facts that would completely alter or nullify the legal proceedings in a non-corrupt judicial system. The fact that Tupolski proceeds to execute Katurian and orders that his stories be burned shows that in this totalitarian state, the authority of the police is not a means of preserving order but an end in itself. The “crime” for which Katurian is punished is that of lying to the police—an assertion of autonomy closely related to the act of writing fiction. By falsely claiming responsibility for his brother’s crimes, Katurian took control of a narrative that Tupolski believed should have been his alone to define. In the eyes of the state, this is the danger of fiction: It threatens the state’s power to define reality. Regardless of whether he bears responsibility for any actual murders, Katurian’s stories are disturbing and thought-provoking, which Tupolski finds threatening in itself. The stories challenge the overarching fiction that the state has created—of itself as a peaceful and happy place.
Katurian’s stories end up surviving only because Ariel is finally able to see the humanity in Katurian and relate to him on a personal level. His empathy for Katurian allows him to transcend authoritarianism and disregard Tupolski’s order. Katurian’s stories are the catalyst that allows him to bond with Ariel, as the stories relate to traumatic experiences they have in common. This is why Katurian’s stories are important—they bring to light uncomfortable ideas that allow people to reflect and shift perspectives, which is the same reason the totalitarian state opts to burn them. The Pillowman portrays censorship as an oppressive overextension of control rooting from an authority’s attempt to shape individuals’ perceptions of reality.
The Impact of Abuse and Trauma
Every character in The Pillowman endures abuse that profoundly impacts their behaviors even years after the abuse occurs. The nature of trauma’s impact is multifaceted; Ariel, Tupolski, and Michal all end up propagating the cycle of abuse in their adulthoods, while Katurian harnesses his trauma as a source of creative inspiration. Michal’s trauma is the most severe, as his parents physically and mentally tortured him as a child. As a result, Michal becomes an unempathetic adult, and essentially a serial killer—he tortures (and kills) two children in grotesque ways, just as his parents did to him. Ariel and Tupolski both share similar trajectories, though to a less extreme degree. Ariel’s father sexually abused him, and as an adult, Ariel takes pleasure in torturing the prisoners he works with. Tupolski’s father presumably abused him as a child—Tupolski says that he was a “violent alcoholic”—and Tupolski himself is violent and addicted to alcohol as an adult, even as he claims (with unconscious irony) that he does not let his father’s abuse affect him. Tupolski, like Michal, is also generally cold and unempathetic, and these traits are presented as the results of his early trauma.
In contrast, Katurian is a compassionate, humanistic adult despite his childhood trauma. His parents forced him to witness their torture of Michal while lying to Katurian that he was inventing it due to his overactive imagination. Katurian started writing as a child, and as the abuse continued, his stories became more and more macabre. His parents abused Katurian intentionally to make him a better writer, and their “experiment” seemed to work. Channeling his negative emotions into writing fiction gives Katurian a unique creative edge. Notably, though, the play is clear that even though trauma may have assisted Katurian’s creative pursuits, it was not a necessary factor for him to become a great writer. He was already talented before the abuse started. In an autobiographical story, Katurian writes, “[H]is stories got darker and darker. They got better and better, due to all of the love and encouragement” (23). Katurian attributes his success more to “love and encouragement” than to abuse but also acknowledges that the trauma has a positive effect on his writing. The fact that Katurian is the only character with a creative hobby and is also the only who doesn’t torture others for enjoyment further suggests that writing acts as a coping mechanism for him. The others have found no other way to respond to their trauma than by inflicting similar traumas on others, but for Katurian, expressing himself through art fulfills this need and prevents his dysphoria from surfacing in harmful ways.
In the cases of all four main characters, childhood trauma and abuse has an overall profoundly negative effect on their lives. Some end up abusing others later in life, but Katurian exemplifies the possibility of redirecting the emotions trauma leaves and funneling them into art instead.
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