Henrick Ibsen’s Ghosts – The Interminable Dominance of the Dead Over The Living

Abstract

Henrick Ibsen’s play Ghosts is a realistic play that deals with the moral aberrations of his contemporary Norwegian bourgeois. This paper talks about two characters infected with syphilis one dead and another about to die. An analysis is made to show how past exerts an influence over the present; the dead over the living; invisible dominates the visible - from the point of view of Ibsen, taking into account all the established doctrines. The paper also states how Ibsen asserts that the blind devotion to outdated standards of behaviour called ‘ghosts’ make life a tragedy and unliveable.