I've been thinking about that conversation lately. The young girl held Ben Camus and said, "Camus said knowing that people are mortal makes life a joke," and the mother with cancer held her six-year-old child and said, "That's because he doesn't have a six-year-old. My daughter, we are all born with a purpose, we have a time limit to accomplish our purpose, try to tell God after you die that it is a joke."
What's interesting is that when the girl was arranged to say this for the first time in the play, a real fight happened immediately, and the real death happened in front of the girl. I thought that girls might change their minds after going through this near-death experience. But, a few more episodes later, the girl said it again when she looked at the dying cancer patient in her bed. Death didn't change her, either in the face of her nearly dead self or her dying patient.
The girl asked a serious question. If there is death, what do you do alive, why do you live?
Betsy offers a clear answer: With God, we all have a purpose. In fact, this answer did not respond to the girl. Because existentialism works on the premise of denying the existence of God. Their argument unfolds in the absence of God. The absence of God is their premise and their most pressing problem. In the absence of God, values become personal choices.
The people in the play have a variety of values. The Mafia family lives for dignity and power. Peggy for self-realization. Ed just wants to keep his homeland and keep the track of his familiar life. In order to maintain order, maintain fairness and justice, and maintain community harmony, the Lou family. Fargo officers for their own promotion within the bureaucracy. These values do not appear to be in conflict. But when there is no basic consensus and common value background, people will have the tragedy we see in the play in order to achieve their own goals first.
To a certain extent, the question becomes, is it still possible to coexist harmoniously under multiple values, or is it inevitable that human society will fall into conflict and chaos?
At the end of the play, Betsy's dad offers an attempt at a solution. He believes that conflict stems from the failure of communication, from the failure of language. He was trying to invent a human language that could be understood together. But it's based on the fact that if they can understand each other, people will come to a consensus. This assumes that there is a pre-existing consensus in human society. However, does this consensus still exist in this era?
Sometimes I think, if I really believed in God, things would be a lot easier. But if it's because of this willingness to choose to believe in God's words, it's just an expedient choice after all. I'm probably not going to be a true believer, but an existentialist who chooses to believe in God.
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