Truth and order in Ionesco's bald sopranoEvery sense of order, of meaning itself, is broken and constantly questioned by Eugene Ionesco in his opera "The Bald Soprano" . A serious challenge is made against an absolute notion of truth. The characters in the play, however, continue to struggle to maintain and share a unified and orderly existence. Empiricism is espoused by several characters. They argue that life experience is all that is needed to establish unshakable order and therefore truth. Mrs. Smith states, “Truth is never found in books, only in life” (29). While this empirical debate highlights the need for unmediated knowledge of truth, Ionesco simultaneously undermines empiricism as a viable method for achieving it. At a fundamental level, order diminishes, deteriorates, and virtually disintegrates as the work progresses. Empiricism is essentially deductive in nature; a logical premise is established by direct sensory experience. This method challenges even the most common assumptions. Nothing is accepted as given without sufficient evidence. In this way, ordinary events such as tying your shoes or reading the newspaper on the subway are made to seem extraordinary. Every otherwise mundane experience contains a new vitality. Mr. Martin exclaims, "Every day you see even more extraordinary things when you go about" (22). The characters seem to lack a certain sense of familiarity (or boredom, perhaps) with such mundane events. Each experience, regardless of size or scope, forces characters to constantly remain in the process of reevaluating and refining the most basic assumptions on which their lives are based. Mrs. Smith's incessant exteriorized interior monologue out in the open...in the center of the paper...isolated statements cease to be intelligible. Ionesco's language towards the end of the work is a language of non sequitir and nonsense. Far from articulating a unified notion of truth, language liberates the capacity to express a cacophony of voices and points of view. Unequivocal statements of any kind become virtually impossible because the power to deny them is ingrained in the fabric of language itself. Ironically, as the work reaches its seemingly chaotic crescendo, Ionesco himself appears to submit to a vaguely cyclical notion of order. The actors' dialogue disintegrates and then reintegrates into a single sentence, thus allowing the play to begin again with new faces, but undoubtedly the same dramatic epilogue. Works Cited Ionesco, Eugene. "The bald soprano." Four comedies by Eugene Ionesco. Trans. Donald M. Allen. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958.