The Wild Duck Literary Elements

Play/drama

Norwegian

The first act takes place in Werle’s house, and the remaining acts all take place at Hialmar Ekdal’s home. It is roughly set in the 1880s.

There is no real narrator or point of view that remains consistent throughout the play, since each character takes turns speaking as in a conventional drama.

More often than not, the play takes on a tragicomic mood. The tone of the play as a whole is similar, but in terms of the characters' language, their tones are fairly sharp, often lapsing into accusations or reprimands.

Gregers Werle at first appears to be both a protagonist and an antagonist since he is a main character in the play who wants to obtain justice, but his initially positive intentions manage to ruin other people’s lives and the coherence of his own family's life. At the same time, one could also say that one of the more secondary characters in the play, Hedvig, is the true protagonist in her innocence and import to the overall plot, with Gregers being the antagonist. Additionally, one can look at the role of Hialmar as it evolves throughout the play and see a similar antihero role for him.

Though the play evolves through a series of interpersonal conflicts (i.e., between Werle and Gregers, between Gregers and Relling, and perhaps even between Gregers and Hialmar), it is most accurate to say that the major conflict in the play is the conflict between truth and falsehood. In each of the interpersonal conflicts that develop, one side (usually the side of Gregers) wants to push both parties to accept a perhaps unrealistic ideal of transparency and truth; meanwhile, the other party wants to maintain the stability in their lives by keeping up a variety of illusions (or else they are suffering the fallout from having such illusions unmasked).

The drama and tensions in the play reach their climax when Hedvig takes her own life at the end of Act 5.

The play makes extensive use of foreshadowing. When Gregers makes a mess in his room upon arriving at the Ekdals' home, for example, it foreshadows the more lasting taint that he is carrying with him into their home. When the hunting pistol is introduced and its unsavory history is related, it foreshadows Hedvig's own eventual suicide with the weapon. These are just a few examples, but Ibsen leaves few loose ends in the play, and almost everything that's introduced in the drama comes to have an increased significance later on.

When referring to the mistakes and sins of their pasts, most characters in the play tend to talk in an elliptical and understated manner.

Because of the drama's intimate nature, few allusions are deployed. Most allusions in the play, however, are associated with the garret, where the "Flying Dutchman" is said to have lived. His various possessions also include a specific book on the history of London, to which an allusion is made.

Written imagery is not widely used in a dramatic format. However, in stage directions, Ibsen gives descriptions of things such as rooms and appearances that allow striking tableaux to be set, nonetheless.

N/A, though a lot of the self-deception and irony in the play resemble paradox in their effects.

Linguistic parallelism is not a major feature in the play, but massive symbolic or thematic parallels are established between Hedvig, Hialmar, Old Ekdal, and the wild duck who lives a strange and captive life in the family's attic.

N/A

Dramatic irony is a major feature of the play, but the play otherwise is fairly preoccupied with realism and psychological excavation. Accordingly, there is little monologue, soliloquy, or other such dramatic devices.