Analysis of the Extract from Heartbreak House

Analysis of the extract from “Heartbreak House” by Bernard Shaw

The text under review is the extract from the play “Heartbreak House” by B.Shaw. The author is the greatest satirical dramatist, who marked the beginning of a new period in the history of English drama and revolutionized English drama in content and form, where he exposed the vices of the society he lived in and condemned the hypocrisy of bourgeois marality. The functional style of the text can be defined as belles-lettres one. The genre is dramatic in a particular play. The factual information is to the following effect: the episode from the conversation between Ellie Dunn and Mangan, where the essence of cruel man is revealed. The conceptual information implicates the idea of shrewdness, when the main characters are not trying to be better than they really are, and the man Ellie had romantically loved turned out to be a shallow story-teller, a petty deceiver. The presence of setting is meaningful here: B. Shaw created a peculiar “shrine” from his artificially isolated house- the ship, but the most important is not the outer look of the house, but the morals which naturally rule here. This is the main feature of this house, here all conspicuous is becoming visible, and the nature of human beings is being revealed. The author accommodated in this unusual house tenants who are not accustomed to reckon with decency and in spite of them call a spade a spade. Compositionally, the extract from the play falls into some logical parts: - the exposition (or the introduction), when the author presents us two main characters in a peaceful conversation , speaking about the country and weather; - the body ( or the main part), where Mr.Mangan with confidence in his voice discloses all his intentions and reveals his nature sarcastically; - the denouement part, which turns into a very surprising way, when Ellie still shows her desire to get