38 pages • 1 hour read
John GuareSix Degrees of Separation
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Imagination
The imagination is an important theme in the play. When Paul pretends that Sidney Poitier is his father, he tells the audience that Poitier used to sit by the sea as a child and “conjure up the kind of worlds that were on the other side and what [he’d] do in them” (22-23). Like his supposed father, Paul uses the imagination to find “the exit from the maze of [his] nightmare” (63), believing that “the imagination is the passport we create to take us into the real world” (34) and something that allows you “to transform your nightmares into dreams” (63). He “imagines” himself as a rich, “preppy” (14) graduate and, later, “imagines” himself as almost a member of Ouisa’s family, all in an effort to find a family and make a better life for himself. For Paul, the imagination is a way of learning one’s “limits and then how to grow beyond those limits” (62) and, ultimately, not something external and alien but “the place we are all trying to get to” (63). Such is his commitment to this idea that his efforts to reach his imagined new life soon transcend socially-acceptable behavior, eventually leading to his arrest.
Family
A need for family is one of Paul’s strongest motivators for his deceptions. Although there are suggestions of this earlier in the play, this motivating factor becomes more explicit when he speaks to Ouisa on the phone towards the play’s ending. He describes the night he spent with Ouisa and Flan as “the happiest night I ever had” (106). He also says that he specifically preferred his time with them to his time with Kitty and Larkin or Dr. Fine because they “just left me alone” whereas “[y]ou and your husband. We all stayed together” (99). After he decides to hand himself in to the police, he begins to fantasize about a life with Ouisa and Flan after he gets out of prison. He imagines himself living with them and working as an art dealer with Flan, almost like their son, something which mirrors his lie to Rick and Elizabeth that Flan is actually his father.
Ouisa eventually goes along with Paul’s desire to become something like a part of her family, largely because she, like many of the other characters, is not especially happy in her actual family life. Compared to her ungrateful, sulky children—one of whom is planning “to ruin her life and get married and throw away everything you want me to be because it’s the only way to hurt you!” (102)—Paul’s talent and geniality make him seem like a far more enjoyable prospect. There is an early indication of this when Ouisa tells her children that Paul “has this wild quality—yet a real elegance and a real concern and a real consideration” (60), causing Tess to remark that she “should have divorced all your children and let this dreamboat stay” (61). Likewise, when Ouisa reflects on her time with Paul, she tells Flan that Paul “did more for us in a few hours than our children ever did” (117). Like Paul, she also uses her imagination to envision a better life and happier family than her current one.
Racism
One of the most notable things about the play is that Paul is the only black character and is surrounded by rich, upper-class white people. Paul’s own relationship with race is complicated. He claims to have not understood when he saw footage of black South Africans rioting and says that does not “even feel black” and “never knew I was black in that racist way till I was sixteen and came back [to America]” (30). Despite this, when he is confronted with the prospect of being arrested, he has to admit to the realities of being black in America, which may involve a risk of being killed by police if “they don’t know you’re special” (110). Ouisa is also forced to confront this when, after she says that the police will not kill Paul, he observes, “Mrs. Louisa Kittredge, I am black” (110). It is not clear exactly what happens to Paul but certainly his prediction of some level of police violence is accurate as he is “[d]ragged him kicking, screaming into a squad car” (116).
Although the other characters appear to be largely liberal in their views, many of them reveal a latent racial prejudice. Geoffrey, for example, is deeply patronizing and paternalistic when he says that white people have to stay in South Africa “to educate the black workers” (10). The other characters sometimes let racially-charged insults slip out, too. Dr. Fine is a particularly prominent example of this. Once he realizes that that Paul is not the nice, upper-class, college-educated black man he had believed him to be, he quickly goes from a hyper-liberal speech about what an inspiration Poitier is for making “new paths for blacks just by the strength of his own talent” (64) to describing Paul as a “fucking black kid crack addict” (66).
