Two Characters In A Straight: Dialogue for a straight Antonio Buero Vallejo

By: Jose and Leonor Sarzi Amade Taiano Campoverde

The dialogue of a play whose main characters ladder two childhood friends: Fernando and Urban. These two friends have lived in the same building small up and down the same ladder that is the main witness of their lives.

Fernando represents the individualistic character, he and Urban comes from a home proletarian character despite his intellect tends more to the harshness of mechanical work. His intellect and his superior intelligence induce him to be extremely individualistic and selfish to some extent, since he thinks that the only way forward is to rely on himself and going alone. Fernando wants to raise, climb in life, but knows that to leave the squalor in which they live both as walking alone Urban necessary:

I do not think anything, I just want to go see? Up! And leave the squalor in which we live.

Urban represents the character aware of his popular origins, knows that from a social situation like yours "unity is strength?. For Urban, Fernando is a bastard, an upstart who thinks just because climbing despite being aware of his lowly origin, is considered superior to others for their intellectual trends and think about their individual progress neglecting the concept of mass.

Fernando, you're a bastard. The worst thing is you do not know. The poor devils like us will never achieve improvement of life without mutual aid, and that's the union. Solidarity! That is our word. And it would be yours if you're not realizing it a sad tacky. But as I think a marquis!

Fernando's character represents the intellectual motionless, absorbed in the individual intellect that makes him feel superior to others, which has no capabilities to perform mechanical work or to adapt to life in mass, but at the same time fails starting any project in your life because it lacks the momentum that contain the proletariat. Urban living despises Fernando inability or incapacity to assume the social status that he said all the poor have been allocated as follows:

... You could not lie to make rhymes or gape, you look for particular jobs to round out the budget and you sleep at three o'clock sleep and happy to save money. Because you'd have to save like a magpie ... .. And when you have a lot of years doing that, and business and seeking ways rehearsing, you would end by asking to see any way not to starve ... You have your wood for that life.

Who is actually the individualist in the play?

From the first act of the play we find two very different characters but of similar origin. Fernando as we said is an independent person, who believes the only way forward is autonomy. Urban thinks instead that the proletarian sector must move together as a cluster of worker ants. Fernando's about believing in yourself, to move by itself. Urban refuge behind others of their ilk. Urban believes in a lower class that survives without progress:

I know I will not get very far, and neither have you come, if I get there, get all, but the easiest is that within ten years follow up the ladder ...

The spectator attempts to progress Fernando and Urban survival is the staircase, in the text that represents both a witness and life itself. The staircase is an object that does not speak personified but look, its steps beyond symbolize the act of going up and down, perhaps embody the movement of the human being up, down, choose different paths but sometimes it does not lead anywhere.

It would remain so terrible! Up and down the stairs, a staircase that leads to nowhere, on the counter cheating, hating the job ..., losing day after day ...

Fernando and Urban embody two types of individuals who seek him as a way to perpetuate life. The ladder is life, a life that, although sometimes you get the idea make it up, down or remain in the same place is sometimes an illusion as it does not lead anywhere.