Bérenger and the Killer

Bérenger and the Killer are joined by an asymmetrical conflict: one is an average, middle-aged citizen who recoils from murder, while the other turns everyday encounters into opportunities to kill. The relationship moves from Bérenger’s horrified scrutiny of the Killer’s method to his urgent resolve to intervene, then toward a final verbal confrontation in which that resolve is tested. The play’s stage directions make the encounter morally unstable: Bérenger does not simply defeat the Killer’s logic but finds himself, unwillingly, arguing on its behalf.

Identity and Dramatic Opposition

Bérenger is introduced as an average citizen, a characterization that gives his response to the Killer a deliberately unheroic starting point. He is not presented in the supplied evidence as a professional investigator or as someone already equipped to oppose violence. The Killer, by contrast, is identified as a central figure in the city’s murders. Their opposition therefore sets an ordinary person’s moral alarm against violence that has become familiar enough to be treated as part of the urban routine.

The contrast is not only between victim and murderer. It is also between Bérenger’s insistence that something must be done and the surrounding acceptance of business as usual. The Killer acts directly and repeatedly; Bérenger first encounters his crimes through an explanation and through their consequences. Their relation takes shape as a struggle over whether knowledge of violence can still produce resistance, or whether it will be absorbed into the habits that allow the violence to continue.

The Killer’s Method and Bérenger’s Recognition

The Architect describes the Killer’s approach as a staged sequence at a tram-stop. People leaving work cannot use private cars outside the Radiant City, so they walk toward the gates. Disguised as a beggar, the Killer solicits alms and sympathy, then selects a likely victim and prolongs the encounter. He offers small goods, including artificial flowers, birds, old-style nightcaps, maps, postcards, cigarettes, and drawings. The bargaining draws the prospective victim toward the pool.

The decisive lure is the Colonel’s photograph. As it grows dark, the victim leans closer to inspect it; the Killer then pushes the person into the pool and drowns them. The account turns murder into a procedure built out of ordinary gestures: approaching, appealing, offering, bargaining, looking. Bérenger’s response identifies the unsettling hinge in that procedure. What astonishes him is not only that people are deceived, but that they know what is happening and still let themselves be drawn in. His observation places the Killer’s success in a wider field of public passivity, rather than making it a matter of concealment alone.

Dany’s Death and Bérenger’s Resolve

The violence becomes personal when the Owner identifies the latest victim as a young woman. Bérenger recognizes her as Dany and cannot accept the identification. The Architect confirms that she was his secretary and former secretary, adding that she had been safe while she remained on his staff and had been warned not to leave it. The detail sharpens the relation between Bérenger and the Killer: the murders are no longer an account of an unknown pattern but a loss Bérenger confronts in the immediate aftermath.

Bérenger crumples in his chair, almost sobbing, while the Architect treats the death as a routine report. The contrast precipitates Bérenger’s change of posture. He suddenly stands and insists that they cannot allow matters to continue and that they must stop. When the Architect tells him to control himself, invokes the inevitability of death, and says the investigation should take its usual course, Bérenger runs out, slamming the imaginary shop door. His repeated insistence that something must be done becomes an action: he leaves rather than remain within the room’s routine of reporting, waiting, and accepting.

The Final Confrontation and Its Reversal

The play’s directions frame Bérenger’s speech to the Killer at the end as a short act in its own right. They specify a gradual breaking-down: Bérenger falls apart, and the vacuity of his commonplace morality collapses like a leaking balloon. Most strikingly, he finds arguments in favor of the Killer within himself, in spite of himself and against his own will. The evidence therefore presents their final relation as more than an encounter between a defender of morality and its opponent. The opposition reaches into Bérenger’s own speech and unsettles the position from which he had condemned the Killer.

That reversal does not erase Bérenger’s earlier protest or establish that he accepts the murders. Rather, the stage direction distinguishes his conscious resistance from the arguments that emerge under pressure. His resolve after Dany’s death and his later moral collapse belong to the same arc: he moves from outrage at public complicity toward a confrontation that exposes how fragile his own ordinary moral language is. The Killer’s significance in this relation lies partly in that pressure. He is the adversary Bérenger means to resist, but also the presence before whom Bérenger’s resistance proves vulnerable.

Dramatic Significance

The relation’s structure makes the city’s violence and Bérenger’s private moral crisis inseparable. The Killer’s method exploits people’s willingness to follow an encounter toward the pool; the surrounding response to each new death risks turning murder into procedure. Bérenger first names the disturbing knowledge that does not prevent people from being taken in, then refuses to accept the routine response when Dany is identified. His departure gives that refusal physical force, even though the final speech later tests the moral certainty behind it.

The stage directions keep the ending from becoming a simple victory narrative. Bérenger’s opposition matters, but it does not remain intact: the play explicitly directs attention to its erosion and to the involuntary arguments that favor the Killer. The relation consequently stages both resistance and its failure of certainty. Bérenger’s confrontation is important not because the evidence establishes that he overcomes the Killer, but because it exposes the instability of the commonplace morality with which he first opposes him.