Summary
Michal asks him to tell the story of the Pillowman, and Katurian agrees. The story is about a man who is nine feet tall and made of fluffy pink pillows. Even his teeth were little white pillows, Katurian says, and Michal asks him to do a smile like the Pillowman. The Pillowman's purpose is to visit people who are about to commit suicide, and bring them back to an earlier time in their lives, and get them to commit suicide as a child, in order to "avoid the years of pain that would just end up in the same place for them anyway." The Pillowman steers the younger selves of these suicidal people towards methods of suicide that look like tragic accidents.
Katurian talks about one little girl who does not believe the Pillowman that her life will be horrible, and sends him away. After she sends him away, a pedophile begins to visit her, until she is 21 and considering suicide by sticking her head in the oven. Michal interrupts, asking Katurian to skip to the end. At the end of the story, the Pillowman is crying about his difficult job, and goes to a willow tree with a can of petrol, where he finds children's toys. As the Pillowman sits under the tree, a Pillowboy comes towards him and they play with the toys there.
Michal becomes fixated on the idea of them playing with a toy dog, but Katurian keeps going with the story. The Pillowboy talks about how he has always wanted to make others happy, as he pours petrol all over himself and lights himself on fire. The Pillowman walks away, and as he does, he hears the screams of the 100,000 children he'd helped to commit suicide coming back to life "and going on to lead the cold, wretched lives that were destined to them because he hadn't been around to prevent them...."
Michal talks about how the Pillowman is his favorite and then tells Katurian that he thought he had hidden the box with the boy's toes very well. In this moment, Katurian realizes that Michal did in fact kill the children he was accused of killing. "You just lied to me," he says, backing away, as Michal describes the murders. Michal then says that Katurian is responsible for planting the idea for the murders in his head, and that he wanted to commit them in order to test how far-fetched they were.
"How come you never acted out any of the nice ones?" Katurian asks, to which Michal replies, "Because you never wrote any nice ones." Michal explains that he did not realize that committing the acts in Katurian's stories would kill the children, before saying, "Well, the torture man certainly seemed to be on my side. He seemed to agree it was all your fault. Well, mostly your fault."
Michal talks about how the Pillowman reminds him of himself, but Katurian insists that this is not the case. As Michal talks about how talented Katurian is, Katurian reminds him that they are going to get executed in an hour and a half. When Michal tries to insist that the stories are just paper, Katurian slams his head against the stone floor, causing it to bleed.
Katurian tells Michal that if they told him they had to burn different things in the cell, he would have them burn Michal first, then himself, and save the stories. Michal accuses Katurian of being like their parents for slamming his head in the ground. Katurian then asks him what he did to the third girl, but Michal refuses to respond. Michal brings up the fact that Katurian murdered their parents, but Katurian presses him about how he killed the third girl.
Michal tells him it was like "The Little Jesus," which makes Katurian cry. Michal tells him that he left the body down near where Katurian left their parents' bodies. Katurian tells Michal that he is going back to the room where he used to get tortured as a child when he dies. "I used to love you so much," Katurian says disgusted by his brother.
Michal confronts Katurian about the story "The Writer and the Writer's Brother," which he is not supposed to have read. He asks him why it didn't end happily, like in real life, and Katurian responds, "There are no happy endings in real life." Michal wants to talk about what a good discus thrower he was, but Katurian reminds him that he came in 4th. Michal tries to get Katurian to agree to change the end of his story about them to keep him alive and have him win the discus.
As Katurian and Michal discuss which of Katurian's stories are not disturbing, they mention "The Face Basement," about slicing someone's face off, and "The Shakespeare Room" about Shakespeare giving "the little black pygmy lady in the box" "a stab with a stick" every time he wants to write a new play.
Analysis
In this section, Katurian tells the story of the titular "Pillowman" on Michal's prompting. This is perhaps the most disturbing of Katurian's stories, detailing a mythical man made of pillows who visits suicidal people and brings them back in time to commit suicide as children, in order to avoid the years of depression that lead to their adult suicides. Yet again, we see a theme of childhood and the horrifying effects of adulthood and adult violence on the lives of children. The story of the Pillowman depicts a deterministically violent world, one in which misfortune is inevitable, even for happy children.
McDonagh deals consistently with disturbing topics like torture, rape, pedophilia, suicide, and abuse, but all with an exceedingly and often disarmingly light touch. For instance, in the middle of "The Pillowman," just as Katurian is describing the suicide of the girl who was sexually assaulted as a child, Michal interrupts to say, "Um, could you skip on to the end, please? This bit's a bit boring." It is a darkly comedic moment, because Katurian's story is anything but boring. We can imagine someone not wanting to hear the story for any number of reasons—whether they find it disturbing, distasteful, or triggering—but not because it is "boring." In this way, McDonagh disorients our perception of what is disturbing and what is humorous, often conflating the two or disrupting our expectations.
A great twist takes place in this section of the play, when Michal suddenly reveals that he did in fact kill the three children that he was accused of killing by the authorities. He blithely recounts the murders as Katurian recoils in horror. To make matters worse, when Katurian asks him why he killed the children, Michal tells him that he did it under Katurian's instructions. "Every story you tell me, something horrible happens to somebody. I was just testing out how far-fetched they were," he says, revealing the way that Katurian's stories inspired him to commit the violent acts.
This twist completely changes the stakes of the play. While previously, we have believed that Michal and Katurian are being wrongly accused of the murder of children and are subject to some kind of state-sponsored censorship of Katurian's work, this all falls away when we realize that Michal is in fact guilty of the murders. This completely changes the question of censorship that was initially presented. Initially the play asked, is it wrong to write a story that depicts violence and will that encourage people to commit acts of violence? After this reveal, the question becomes, is a story that encourages an isolated act of violence immoral or worthy of punishment?
The play sets up a rather amoral situation, in which both of the brothers are innocent in different ways, in spite of their capacity for horrible acts. Katurian is not a murderer, but all of his stories are horrifying. Meanwhile, Michal is not a ill-intentioned person, and is quite innocent of the repercussions of his crimes as a result of his brain damage; and yet he has committed horrible murders. One cannot easily call these characters evil or antagonistic, yet their lives have been marred by trauma, tragedy, and violence.
