Learning Fairly Quickly About Alan's Violent Act,

Learning fairly quickly about Alan's violent act, throughout the play the entire play, the reader always faces the most important question that arises from the lines of the book: "why does Alan blind the horses In order to be able to answer this question, the play needs to be approached from two different points-of-view. The first one would be the real world, a world where such an act is not only not blamed, but fully not understood and catalogued as a psychiatric problem.

On the other hand, we have the "equus" world, created by the author to support such acts. As Peter Shaffer himself states, equus "creates a mental world in which the deed could be made comprehensible" Hesther gives the best overall evaluation of what the real world thinks of the act: "the boy's in pain .. That's all I see".

This is an obvious reaction that many people have when faced with something they do not understand, especially with an individual's own beliefs and reactions, too deep and obscure to be considered anything else than a problematic pain. For all members of the real world, Alan Strang is in pain, his act was caused by inner sufferance. On the other hand, we have the "equus" world, a mythological world born from Alan's imagination.

There are no rules in the "equus" world or rather there are different rules, rules that only the priests of the horse-god can understand and put into practice. Most important of all, Alan's imagination plays the demiurgic role and creates the status necessary for all actions. Rather than a deregulated world, the "equus" world is a world with rules of its own and a way of functioning that cannot be understood.

These two worlds are interconnected by the presence of Martin Dysart, the psychiatrist who attempts on one side to cure Alan and, on the other, to understand the rules of his imaginary world and replicate them functionally in the real world. According to him, "the Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health, and I am his Priest". He is the necessary presence that needs to explain the unnatural, while transposing it, usually modified, in the real world.

The presentation was necessary in order to adapt the solutions to the problem, as it was described in the initial paragraph, from several different perspectives. First of all, the imaginary perspective, as it appears in Alan's world.

If we look at his imagination, the way it functions and the mythological creation he lives in, with the horse-god equus and similar characters, we may understand that the violent act was the result of his acting as one of the priests of the horse-god, as a reasonable act according to the rules in his imaginary world. On the other hand, the horse-god himself brings about several extra questions.

Is he the Devil, as Alan's mother clearly points out, or is he simply a mythological figure in which Alan believes, a creed rather than a true malicious representation pushing him to do terrible deeds? Dysart perhaps best expresses this when he asks himself "what dark is this In this sense, we may turn to the real world explanations and dispose of our problem simply by stating that the boy is mentally disturbed.

Our rules would be enough to thus label him, because, according to the real world, blinding six horses with a spike is an act of madness. This is one of the solutions to our problem we need to consider: the boy was mad. He is now being treated by a reputed psychiatrist who goes to any length to explain what happened. Unfortunately, the psychiatrist does not allow us to fully adopt this solution.

He is the one that unveils Alan's imagination and who shows us that there is definitely more to the matter than this. A second answer to our problem is thus the idea that the boy has an extremely rich imagination, an imagination which allows him to create mythological demiurgic characters that turn him to violent acts. His passion is fully devoted.