Doubt a Parable

Introduction

John Patrick Shanley's play Doubt, a Parable (2004) revisits the world he knew as a child, the Bronx of the 1960's. The story centers upon a Catholic Irish- Italian school community, and the plot relates to a doubt - that grows into belief, and ends up as certainty - on the part of Sister Aloysius, the principal of the school. She is persuaded that Father Flynn, the vicar, has been harassing the only Black student in the school. The play is an open-ended construct, allowing each reader/spectator to build his own interpretation of the facts implied. Shanley is more than the author of the play. He is also the producer of the stage version, the author of the screenplay and the director of the movie version (Cullingford, 2010).

Discussion

The play Doubt, a Parable is a work about doubts. In this aesthetic construct we can see a combination of images that relate to questions that have been haunting contemporary ethics and philosophy. The two millennia of Christianity that have forged our history are now being deconstructed and analyzed by contemporary thinkers.

As the good comes along with the bad, there is a positive side and a negative side to this process. On the one hand, the realization that there is no immanent truth, but rather a number of different approaches to the same phenomena, is redeeming and allows people to move in a freer and more independent way (Stoker, 2008).

On the other hand, the price paid for that has impaired any possibility of mythical thought in the present day when people seem to have more difficulty in finding articulations between reality and imagination, reason and symbolic thought, technology and humanization. We have come close to an aporia where all our doubts seem to be meaningless. Shanley's play invites us into an investigation of this present tension, by approaching the issue of doubt. The receptors (readers and spectators) are provoked into considering the different sides of the notion of Truth, which foments our uncertainties about what is real in a world that sometimes seems unreal.

The point to stress here is that we are not always aware about the extent of our doubts, or even about what doubts really are. According to Louis Althusser (2005), if we trust, we subscribe to a certain ideology; and if we suddenly find ourselves acting against the things we believe, that means that ...