Character of Sergeant
The play has a simple structure, is only seven pages long, and has
only four characters. The brevity of the play allows for the message to be
direct and clear. The Sergeant and the Ragged Man are the two main characters.
They are also antagonists (opponent), by all social
norms. The Sergeant stands for what is good, law and order, and in
the old English way.
The two main characters work as caricatures (exaggerated
for comic effect), not as individual people. Their descriptions are
purposefully vague, so that the reader can easily identify with them as generic
Irishmen. The Sergeant is not described physically, and he does not even have a
Christian name. Known only as Sergeant, he spends much of the introductory
segment stressing his duty and loyalty to the law. The Ragged Man is also a
personification: “Dark hair—dark eyes—smooth face, height five feet
five—there’s not much to take hold of in that”, says the Sergeant upon reading
the Man’s wanted notice.
Throughout the play, there
are several inversions between good and bad, and up and down. The Sergeant
would represent good and up, the Man bad and down. At the beginning, the
Sergeant says,
“Haven’t we a whole
country depending on us for law and order? It’s those that are down would be up
and those that are up would be down, if it wasn’t for us.”
Thus, Sergeant represents
the status of the current social order.
The Sergeant is looking for an escaped
convict/Irish revolutionary/freedom fighter. A random “ballad singer” appears
out of nowhere and helps the Sergeant keep watch for the convict.
The Sergeant is loyal to
the law, the norm, and the English. The Sergeant knows that there is both a
monetary reward (Consisting of money) for turning in the Man, and also a social
reward in the form of a probable promotion. He has a duty to the force, and
probably to his family, and he is loyal to them. The Sergeant hates music,
and resists every time the Man speaks: we can assume that hearing folk songs
makes the Sergeant feel guilty for abandoning Irish nationalism. Eventually,
the Sergeant sings “Granuaile” and this is the moment when the sergeant
and the man begin to work together.
They both sit there in the dark and talk
about how the Sergeant could have ended up like the convict, that they may have
grown up together and been good friends. Come to find out, just as everyone
with multiple functioning brain cells predicted, the “ballad singer” is the
escaped convict. And naturally, the Sergeant covers for him so that he can
escape to freedom. As the Man escapes by boat, this
line of distinction is blurred: we no longer know if the Sergeant is the enemy,
nor what the Sergeant is loyal to.
The criminal has become
good, and the Sergeant is left grappling with his own values. This suggests
that inversion is both good and necessary for Irish nationalism. Lady Gregory
is suggesting that there is less of a binary between good and bad and up and
down—that the real distinction is between Nation and Other. The Irish should
focus less on the tensions between themselves, and focus instead on their
shared heritage.
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