THE MOTIVE OF LOST ILLUSIONS IN W.S. MAUGHAM’S “FOR SERVICES RENDERED” AND J. B. PRESTLEY’S “TIME AND THE CONWAYS”

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze the motive of lost illusions in W.S. Maugham’s “For Services Rendered” and J. B. Priestley’s “Time and the Conways”. This motive is realized, firstly, at the level of the system of characters, when two authors show characters with broken hearts, thus the idea of “a heartbreak house” becomes the dominant one in these plays. Secondly, both playwrights use a circular composition, showing the life circle of their characters. The article concludes about the genre diversity of the works of the two authors: Maugham creates a social drama (focusing on the fate of representatives of the "lost generation", the spiritual blindness of the adherents of good old England), Priestley - a philosophical "drama of time" with its characteristic semantics: the loss of time, the compression of time and its reverse flow. Besides, the article discusses a historical and literature context of post-war time: we find typological connections with Siegfried Sassoon’s poetry and Ernest Hemingway’s novel “A Farewell to Arms”.