A Review of Sam Shepard’s Play Curse of the Starving Class in Perspective of Virtue Concept

Abstract Focusing on the “virtue” concept, this paper reviews Sam Shepard’s “Curse of the Starving Class” as a critical approach to the lifestyle of modern American society. The family structure and interrelations among its members as implied in the design of dialogues, characters, and the plot, is almost bizarre from any view of pre-modern virtue concept, and it draws a realm of individualistic life consisted of seemingly aimless, scattered and splitted behaviours instead of a whole family picture with common goals and shared feelings. The most prominent of the changes in descriptions of the “virtue” concept through its journey from antiquity to the current era has been the modern one which splits it into two areas, individual and public, according to the individual’s new position in the economical production relations. While, in any given traditional western society, the goal to searching for goodness in one’s whole life is the main virtual consideration, the modern view focuses more on the public domain and leaves the search to the individual’s “free will”. Identity erosion in the play’s characters appeares in the familial components like parental role modelling, love, protection amd reliability