Analysis of Scene 9 - “True West” by Sam Shepard
Scene 9 of the Drama “True West” written by Sam Shepard is about the brothers struggle which ends in a fight.
In this scene Austin & Lees mother came back from Alaska to see what’s going on and because she misses her plants. In Addition to that Lee narrates that he sold a screenplay and that he won the bet. Afterwards Lee tells his Mom that they are going to leave the house to live in the desert he starts to struggle with Austin, because of his book. This struggle ends in a serious fight in which some of them could be killed by the other.
This scene is the most important scene, because here you can see how variable people can be. I mean Austin is very quiet and do whatever Lee says , which you can see in the moment, when Austin’s supposed to read out how far they are and Lee gets a little bit aggressive, because it seems to be that Austin wrote something down which Lee never said ( p.82 L.1). In this situation Austin stays calm and back down himself under Lees wishes, because I think he just want to show that he is the professional and good in what he’s doing, which you can see in his reaction . But Austin also have a kind of conversion, because at the beginning of the scene he is calm and something like that but in the end he gets very aggressive, which u can see at his statement that he would be able to kill him (p.92 L. 8-9 & 14 15). I think the authors wants to show with this reaction that everybody could be act totally different to his normal behaviour in a kind of extreme situation.
Furthermore the author wants to portray the indifference of some people and so he uses the figure of the Mom as a kind of representation of indifference, which you can see in her statement, that the boys should fight outside of the house (p. 90 L.8) and that Lee wouldn’t kill Austin because they are brothers (p.92 L.1), which is a really naïve statement, too.
