deus ex machina

The deus ex machina is presented as a theatrical device and, more pointedly, as a real-life wish: an intervention from outside that can untangle situations in which people’s competing claims make action seem impossible. In Toru Watanabe’s account of Euripides, the god’s arrival restores order to a chaos of conflicting ideas of justice and happiness. Midori’s imagined real-world version exposes the comfort—and the unreality—of believing that a decisive rescue might appear when life offers no easy way forward.

The Device in Euripidean Tragedy

Watanabe introduces the subject while describing his university History of Drama class, which he attends with Midori and in which he is working on Euripides. He identifies Euripides as one of the three major Greek tragedians, alongside Aeschylus and Sophocles, and notes his own preference for Sophocles as a matter of taste. The explanation that follows is therefore a student’s account of dramatic structure, offered in conversation rather than as a formal lecture.

In Watanabe’s description, Euripidean plots gather many characters, each with a distinct situation, reason, excuse, and pursuit of justice or happiness. Those claims cannot all prevail at once. Their collision traps the characters: instead of producing a resolution through their competing efforts, the conflict overwhelms their ability to act, and chaos takes over. The device answers that impasse by introducing a god at the end of the play.

The god is not merely another participant in the conflict. Watanabe characterizes him as a fixer who directs the characters—sending one here, another there, bringing people together or telling them to remain still—until everything works out. The label deus ex machina names this abrupt external solution. Watanabe adds that the device appears in Euripides often enough to divide critical opinion, tying the technique to disagreement about the playwright rather than treating it as an uncontested virtue.

From Stage Convention to Real-Life Wish

Midori carries the discussion beyond literary criticism by asking what it would mean if a deus ex machina existed in real life. Her question turns a device for closing a play into an imagined form of rescue. If someone felt stuck or trapped, a god might descend and solve the problems for them; the difficulties that had seemed immovable could be rearranged from above.

That possibility is attractive precisely because the preceding explanation has described conflicts without a solution available to the people inside them. In the theatrical example, the god can impose order where every character’s justice or happiness cannot be satisfied. In Midori’s hypothetical, the same power promises relief from being stuck. But the conversation presents this as an imagined ease, not a claim that real life supplies such interventions: the god belongs to the wished-for answer, while the characters’ predicament gives the wish its force.

The Conversation’s Setting and Narrative Function

The exchange occurs while Watanabe is speaking to Midori’s father. After laying out the class topic, Watanabe receives no spoken response; the older man keeps his vacant eyes on him, and Watanabe cannot tell whether he understands. Watanabe ends the monologue by saying, “Peace,” a small, inconclusive close after an account of plots whose tidy endings depend on a god’s intervention.

That setting gives the expression a second kind of unresolvedness. Watanabe can explain how a playwright’s device works, but he cannot read understanding from his listener’s expression. The conversation thus moves from an account of a mechanism that makes confusion resolve neatly to a present encounter whose response remains unknown. The god’s power to direct every character offers a striking contrast with the limits of ordinary communication in the scene.

The expression’s significance rests on that contrast rather than on a promise of rescue. Onstage, an external authority can settle a deadlock and manufacture a perfect ending; in Midori’s real-life thought experiment, that ending becomes an appealing possibility for anyone who feels trapped. By locating the device in a discussion of tragedy and then testing it against life, the novel makes the deus ex machina both a formal solution and an image of the solution people might wish for when no one involved can make all competing claims come true.