Motifs of Repetition of Fate and Return to the Past in Some of Sam Shepard’s Plays

Abstract

Sam Shepard once commented on what he deemed the notion of family and heredity: “What doesn’t have to do with family?
There isn’t anything, you know what I mean? Even a love story has to do with family. Crime has to do with family. We all come out of
each other everyone is born out of a mother and a father, and you go on to be a father. It’s an endless cycle.”. Critics consider Curse of
the Starving Class (1977) and Buried Child (1978) the ¿rst two parts of a “family trilogy” completed by True West (1980), or the ¿rst two
plays in a quintet – those three works plus Fool for Love (1983) and A Lie of the Mind (1985). True West and A Lie of the Mind are
flooded with references to the past, as the characters eagerly attempt to fix familial and cultural history. The obsession with memory
leads to an awareness of erosion, perhaps a desire to forget, repress, ignore, deny or falsify the facts. However, in Shepard’s work,
nothing is further from the truth that all the characters feel in their unconsciousness and refuse uttering. The terms “homecoming” and
“heritage” are bullets capable of crushing any preconceived notion of either. Upon closer inspection, legacy takes the form of addiction,
disconnection, and displacement whereas homecomings provide shelter and entrapment, offering numberless opportunities to recover,
dredge up, or scatter the ashes of the past.