Violence In Mcdonagh's The Pillowman

One of the most interesting factors in McDonagh’s The Pillowman is the different types of violence in the play those are somehow justified and are treated in such an intricate and complex way that it becomes really hard to know the boundaries between who is the victim and who is the perpetrator.

During the play, these types of violence can be touched by the audiences easily. The only thing that is necessary for people, is just to understand the different types of violence. As it mentioned before, violence is the use of physical or emotional force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy something or somebody and it can be classified into nine different types. By the way, violence in this play can be categorized into four main

Tupolski: I would call them guidelines.
Katurian: Guidelines, yes.
Tupolski: Given certain guidelines, the security of whatever, it isn’t crime, you write a story. (McDonagh 7)

The other point is the name of Katurian Katurian Katurian. The fact that the artist’s name is repeated three times and it is also the representation of the standardization enforced by the state. Even the names of the people are determined by the state and there is no choice about it, although everybody knows it is ridiculous. So, the state uses not only subjective violence through a politics of fear, but also it uses systemic violence to show its power over everything. This dialogue is a perfect example of state violence that implicitly emphasize the totalitarian violence over people to make them one-dimensional, obedient, non-questioning subjects. Zizek uses another term for this and calls “systemic violence;” he defines it as “the often-catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.” (Zizek, 2) He suggests that the subjective violence occurs implicitly and in an invisible form that sometimes nobody understand it because it is presented in a normal way. Zizek also suggests that “it has to be taken into account if one is to make a sense of what otherwise seem to be ‘irrational’ explosions of subjective violence.” (Zizek,