Addiction to/in Ion Luca Caragiale: Buddies, Chit-Chat, Beer Houses, Coffee Houses
Addiction to/in Ion Luca Caragiale: Buddies, Chit-Chat, Beer Houses, Coffee Houses

Summary/Abstract: The following text proposes to demonstrate two things. First, the relationship of Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale with the critics over the decades is one of apparent addiction. These critics espouse everything from sublime adulation to unfair disparagement. Secondly, the article explores particular types of characters, the ‘buddies’, whose identitary parameters are close mutual dependence, addiction to conversation and to the place where this happens, the beer or the coffee house. Both hypotheses refute the grim predictions regarding a potential lack of endurance and the charge of having penned works of destructive satire, attacking the Romanian people and their country. Therefore, the first half of my paper will offer a review of literary critiques, while the second half will analyze, through the comparative method, “Amicii”, “Lache şi Mache”, “Amicul X” “Situaţiune”, and “O lacună”, five works of fiction that offer a typology of ‘buddies’. This will hopefully prove that Caragiale was not ‘anti-Romanian’, a ‘rascal’ or ‘laughing with cruelty’, but, on the contrary, was a ‘wise, good and ironic’ observer of human nature.

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