Bérenger's Confrontation with the Killer

Bérenger’s Confrontation with the Killer brings the play’s pursuit of a murderer to an impasse: Bérenger can identify and threaten the Killer, but cannot make him answer, secure the police’s intervention, or carry out his own threatened vengeance. In the closing encounter, personal grief and appeals to shared humanity give way to armed resistance, then to surrender. The Killer’s silence leaves Bérenger’s explanations unanswered and makes the final advance of the knife the scene’s decisive action.

Encounter and Dramatic Setting

Before the Killer appears, Bérenger calls for Édouard, then accepts that his friend will not come. He looks at his stopped watch and postpones the attempt to report the murderer until tomorrow, imagining that the Superintendent will arrest him then. Turning around, he loses his sense of direction and suddenly sees the Killer close by. The encounter begins, therefore, after a chain of deferrals: Bérenger has not reached the authorities, Édouard is absent, and even the watch that might measure time has stopped.

The stage directions reduce the setting to a wall and a bench, with a plain and a faint glow at the horizon; the two figures are picked out against semi-darkness. The Killer is described as small and shabby, with a torn hat, a worn gaberdine, holes in his shoes, and one glittering eye. He may be standing on the bench or wall before calmly jumping down to approach Bérenger. Yet the directions also allow that there may be no Killer at all and that Bérenger could be talking to himself alone in the half-light. This uncertainty makes the confrontation theatrically unstable without resolving it as an illusion: the encounter is staged as both a meeting with a particular murderer and a scene in which Bérenger confronts an apparently unanswerable presence.

Recognition, Threat, and Failed Authority

Bérenger recognizes the figure as the murderer and first responds with the prospect of calling the police and having him arrested. The Killer merely chuckles. Bérenger’s threat exposes how little authority he possesses in this isolated setting: he wonders whether the police would even hear him. The scene gives no sign that they arrive. The earlier plan to secure an arrest tomorrow has led not to official intervention but to a direct encounter that Bérenger must face alone.

He next insists that he is not afraid and claims that he could crush the Killer, but then explains that he wants answers. He asks for the murderer’s reasons and appeals to his humanity, treating the possibility of explanation as a way to understand the violence. The Killer’s chuckles and gestures do not supply a motive. Each attempt at conversation thus sharpens the gap between Bérenger’s need to make violence intelligible and the Killer’s refusal—or inability—to participate in that effort.

Grief and Appeals to Understanding

Bérenger connects the murders to the happiness he believes the Killer has destroyed. He describes the Radiant City as a shining district whose radiance might have spread through the world, a new light from France, and argues that patience could have brought happiness even to the murderer. This appeal locates the conflict within Bérenger’s hopes for a shared social future: he does not present the Killer’s violence merely as a personal injury, but as the destruction of a possible happiness for many people. The murderer offers no response to this vision.

Bérenger’s most personal appeal concerns Dany, whom he identifies as his fiancée. He recalls her as beautiful and kind, while acknowledging that she could be hot-tempered and liked her own way. He challenges the logic of killing people for ordinary irritations or disagreement, and then asks what the Officer in the Engineers and the Staff Officer had done to deserve the same violence. These questions extend his grief beyond his own relationship with Dany, though he recognizes that mentioning her could make the confrontation seem like a private matter. The Killer’s chuckling continues; no answer clarifies why any of the victims were attacked.

From Brotherhood to Coercion

As the questioning fails, Bérenger tests possible explanations for the Killer’s outlook, including the belief that society is rotten, that reform is futile, or that existence itself is a mistake. He then admits that he had wanted revenge and had imagined arrest and execution, but calls vengeance and punishment inadequate. Within seconds of seeing the Killer, he says, anger gave way to something like love: the two are members of the same species, and hatred of the other would entail hatred of himself. He insists on human fellow feeling and brotherhood, but the Killer again answers only with a chuckle.

Bérenger eventually abandons the demand to discover a motive and asks the Killer to stop killing even if there is no reason behind the murders. His plea contracts in scale and duration: he asks for a month, then a week, then forty-eight hours, just long enough to give people a chance to breathe. The Killer draws a large, shining knife from his pocket and plays with it. That quiet gesture changes the balance of the scene: the plea for a pause has met not a promise or argument but a visible weapon.

Pistols, Surrender, and Significance

Bérenger turns from pleading to insult and violence. Kneeling, he insists that he is taking better aim, then pulls two pistols from his pockets and threatens to shoot the Killer, hang him, and dismember him. Yet the Killer remains still, chuckling as he raises the knife. Bérenger aims at a figure only two paces away but does not fire. He recognizes that his strength and bullets seem inadequate against the Killer’s cold determination and stubborn will; his threat to finish the encounter never becomes an act.

In the final reversal, Bérenger slowly lowers the pistols, lays them on the ground, bows his head, and remains on his knees with his arms hanging at his sides. He stammers that nothing can be done. As the Killer draws nearer, still chuckling softly, the curtain falls. The scene does not show what happens after that approach, but it ends with Bérenger disarmed and the Killer advancing. The confrontation therefore closes neither with justice nor with an answered question: Bérenger’s successive claims—arrest, explanation, solidarity, restraint, and force—fail to alter the Killer’s conduct. His abandonment of the pistols gives the ending its bleak shape, turning the encounter from an attempted pursuit into an image of helplessness before violence that will not enter into dialogue.