MRS. SMITH: Well, this is how it was. It is difficult for me to speak openly to you, but a fireman is also a confessor. - Eugène Ionesco

Not so with our characters. They have no metaphysics, no order, no law. They are miserable and they don’t know why. They are puppets, undone. In short, they represent modern man. Their situation is not tragic, since it has no relation to a higher order. Instead, it’s ridiculous, laughable, and derisory.

Béranger represents the modern man. He is a victim of totalitarianism — of both kinds of totalitarianism, of the Right and of the Left. When Rhinoceros was produced in Germany, it had fifty curtain calls. The next day the papers wrote, “Ionesco shows us how we became Nazis.” But in Moscow, they wanted me to rewrite it and make sure that it dealt with Nazism and not with their kind of totalitarianism. In Buenos Aires, the military government thought it was an attack on Perónism.

Zaci pe caldarîm,în stradă... E lume multă.Toți se grăbesc.Își închipuie că au o țintă,nu știu cu adevărat încotro se duc.Strigi.Se dau de-o parte ca să nu te calce în picioare,căci nu sunt cruzi,sunt doar nepăsători.Își poartă în ei propria moarte,nu o pot purta pe a ta..