The Wild Duck

Gregers Werle comes home carrying a fixed idea: that people cannot live honestly on a foundation of lies. He turns this conviction on his old friend Hjalmar Ekdal, whose contented household rests on secrets Gregers is determined to expose. What he calls truth-telling works instead like a slow poison, and the person it destroys is the one least able to survive it, Hjalmar’s young daughter Hedvig, who keeps a wounded wild duck in the attic. Ibsen mixes ordinary domestic comedy with something close to tragedy, and he quietly mocks the idealist who wrecks a family to satisfy a principle. It marked a turn toward the symbolic in his late plays. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available to download.