Editing Eugène Ionesco (section)

===The full-length plays===
With ''[[The Killer (play)|Tueur sans gages]]'' translated as ''The Killer'' (1959; his second full-length play, the first being ''Amédée, ou Comment s'en débarrasser'' in 1954), Ionesco began to explore more sustained dramatic situations featuring more humanized characters. Notably this includes Bérenger, a central character in a number of Ionesco's plays, the last of which is ''[[Le Piéton de l'air]]'' translated as ''[[A Stroll in the Air]]''.

Bérenger is a semi-autobiographical figure expressing Ionesco's wonderment and anguish at the strangeness of reality. He is comically naïve, engaging the audience's sympathy. In ''[[The Killer (play)|The Killer]]'' he encounters death in the figure of a serial killer. In ''[[Rhinoceros (play)|Rhinocéros]]'' he watches his friends turning into rhinoceroses one by one until he alone stands unchanged against this mass movement. It is in this play that Ionesco most forcefully expresses his horror of ideological conformism, inspired by the rise of the [[fascism|fascist]] [[Iron Guard]] in Romania in the 1930s. ''Le Roi se meurt'' translated as ''[[Exit the King]]'' (1962) shows him as King Bérenger I, an [[everyman]] figure who struggles to come to terms with his own death.