The Chairs Versions of Reality Quotes

Already in the first few lines, the play is messing with our heads. The Old Man says it's one time of day and his wife says it's another. There's really no telling what is true and what is not. Reality is constantly shifting in this strange, distorted world. All this makes us wonder if anything around us is actually real. Is it all just a dream?

The Old Man and his wife spend every evening playing pretend to relieve their boredom. This throws the reality of the whole play into question: when the invisible guests start to arrive later on, we wonder whether they are real or just part of the game.

This is where questions of what's real and what isn't really get started in the play. Before the elderly couple re-enters the stage accompanied by the invisible Lady, we hear them greeting her offstage. We assume she'll be played by a real actor, just like the Old Man and Old Woman. When they come on speaking to an empty space, we immediately begin to wonder if these people are crazy, or if they can see something we can't.

Throughout the play, the Old Man has to define for his wife exactly what invisible things she is seeing. In the example above, she's totally unclear about what the present is. She makes all kinds of wild guesses. This seems to support the idea that this whole thing is just in the couple's heads. You could interpret the entire play as a fantasy of the Old Man's which his less imaginative wife is helping bring to life. (Side note: we'd never invite anybody to a party who gave crows as presents.)

Here the Old Man and Woman completely disagree on a pretty fundamental fact – not one that would likely slip your mind. It's impossible to know which one is telling the truth, or if either even remembers the truth anymore. This is just another example of how the play warps reality.

Here the Old Woman recounts an argument she had with her son, a disagreement over reality. He thought the sky was red and the streets were full of dead birds, whereas she thought the sky was a cheerful blue and that all the happy little birds were singing in the trees. Perhaps this disagreement over the reality of the situation is an example of a mother trying to shield her son from the harsh realities of death. Then again, maybe her kid was just really morbid. There's no way to know what really happened, or (again) whether the elderly couple even ever had a son.

So here's a question: if the invisible people are just products of the old couple's imagination, then why do we hear all these sounds? We hear the guest's boats arriving and them ringing the doorbell. The doors even open and close as they enter. Ionesco has filled the play with suggestions that the invisible people aren't real, but then he goes and does stuff like this. What gives, Eugene? It could be that there really are invisible people. Or it could be that we, the audience, are being drawn into the old couple's hallucination. We have a feeling that Ionesco has us right where he wants us: constantly questioning what is real.

This quote brings up an interesting possibility: what if the invisible people are actually ghosts? Some scholars have suggested that the play takes place at the end of the world and the Old Man and Woman are the last people on earth. You could choose to see the invisible guests as the ghosts of everyone who was annihilated in whatever disaster destroyed humanity. This, of course, makes the Old Man's quest to bring meaning to everyone's life even more absurd.

The Old Man seems totally surprised when the Orator walks in. This seems to support the theory that the couple was playing make-believe the whole time. What do you think it means that the Orator is played by a real person? Does it mean he's actually real? Or have we as the audience been totally sucked into the old couple's dream world?

Ionesco ends the play by throwing one more question about reality at his audience. What does it mean that only now we hear the invisible crowd? Were they there the whole time? Why can we hear them only now that all of the "real" people have left the stage?