Peer Gynt

From the beginning of the play, Peer expresses the belief that he is extraordinary and is meant to live an extraordinary life. He tells his mother that one day, he will be an emperor. However, the limits of his world make this extremely unlikely, if not impossible. He lives in a small Norwegian village with little money or talent. So Peer invents lies about himself that make him seem mythical, or would if anyone believed him. As theatre scholar Klaus van den Berg asks of Peer: “If you lie; are you real?” Peer sees a boy in the forest who has two options. He can live a life of danger and adventure as a draftee in the military. Or he can chop off his finger and live a quiet but small life. He chops off his finger. When the troll woman approaches Peer with their child, he is presented with the opportunity to live out a simple life with the woman he loves, to become the mundane person with the quiet life. However, that would require him to give up the part of himself that believes that he is truly an emperor. So rather than chop off that finger, he goes on a journey.

Before Peer meets the troll king, his sense of self clashes with the person he has been trained to be. But the troll king teaches him to “be true to [him]self-ish” (81). This gives Peer the permission to compromise, and to bend his understanding of himself. But at the end of the play, he learns that “be[ing] true to [him]self-ish” (81) centers on being selfish. There are multiple meanings of the phrase “be true to yourself.” There is the obvious meaning, which is to refuse to compromise yourself for anyone or anything. But it also means to put yourself above all others. At the madhouse in Cairo, Begriffenfeldt reassures Peer that the inmates are “one hundred percent themselves. They sail as themselves, full steam ahead. They climb into barrels of self, bung themselves in with self, and pickle themselves in self. No one weeps for others’ suffering. No one cares what others think. Utterly ourselves, in thought, word and deed” (154). Prioritizing the search for self is a selfish mission. 

While Peer sets out to find an absolute and essential understanding of himself, the play shows that self-hood is conditional and situational. Throughout the play, Peer tries on and performs different identities, from a Bedouin sheikh to a traveling scholar. Peer’s trip to the madhouse, which has been redefined as a sanctuary for the sane in a world full of people who have now presumably gone mad, shows how language defines and reifies identity. The inmates show how social pressures can press and conform one’s sense of self. Age also affects and changes Peer’s identity. This becomes clear at the end of the play, when Peer returns to his home village. He discovers that Peer Gynt has become a legendary figure—a cautionary tale, since he supposedly “came to a bad end” and was “hanged, years ago” (174). In the final scenes, identity becomes a matter of what is preserved after death through memory, epitaphs, and the fate of one’s soul. Peer becomes more afraid of losing his sense of self than of death or damnation. He also discovers that the best version of himself, the one who is loved and faithful, has been kept all of these decades by Solveig. Peer Gynt asks who we are and why we’re here, and what we should give up in order to seek the answers to these questions.