And then, just as with the prison etchings, there is the overall darkness of his vision.
Because of his elliptical style and the darkness of his vision, he could be regarded as a postmodernist.
For just a few seconds I was immersed in the immortal darkness of Euripides' vision of human beasts.
(Dahlia Lithwick, at Slate, has a good post on the darkness of the vision the Court's conservatives have embraced instead).
The evening's final selection, from the last pages of "The Unnamable," spews forth in a gabble of furious terse phrases as the insistent darkness of Beckett's vision blooms at its richest.
Jin's attention to the minutiae of daily life has earned him comparisons to Balzac and Dickens, but in the darkness of his philosophical vision he is far closer to Camus.
He did not like the darkness of Kafka's vision, and, in a remarkable sentence of dismissal, gets to the heart of a certain theological malaise in Kafka: "He fears punishment, and at the same time desires it . . . a sickness within Kafka himself".
In bookending the cycle this way, Ms. Hynes accentuates the essential darkness of Synge's vision of life, which may come as a surprise to theatergoers familiar with his best-known play (indeed, for most, his only known play), the savagely funny "Playboy of the Western World".
And yet it does not entirely succeed in realizing its purpose, for two reasons: it is too often defeated by the willful childishness of its characters and, more important, it slides to a happy, Hollywood, love-conquers-all sort of ending that is inconsistent with the spiritual darkness of its overall vision.
