The Sense of Loss in David Rabe's Sticks and Bones

This paper explores the sense of loss as reflected in David Rabe's Sticks and Bones at three levels: individual, familial and societal ones. Throughout the play, Rabe successfully captures the lost individual who fails to locate a definite meaning for his/her life and how this failure extends to invade the familial and social lives as well. On the individual level, David, the main character of the play, faces endless suffering after returning blind from the Vietnam War. He is lost and searches for his own identity. On the familial and societal levels, all the members of David's family, a microcosm of the American society as a whole, vote (even the mother) for getting rid of their returned blind son. Instead of helping him via rehabilitating him, they help him to commit suicide. This paper, therefore, adopts a psychoanalytic approach to examine closely how the sense of loss dominates the whole atmosphere of Rabe's Sticks and Bones