In both Tennessee William's "The Glass Menagerie" and Henrik Ibsen's "Ghosts", the absent father can be seen as supportive of Derrida's theory of Differance. The privileging of binary opposites in logocentric Western thought can be seen to be overturned in both plays, and both are tragedies because of this overturning through the agency of the absent father. The role of the absent father figure in both plays is to deconstruct the family, creating tragedy. They represent a reversal of the privileging of presence/speech over absence/writing. …
