Alienation and Family Theme Analysis

One of the most notable features of The Caretaker is the alienation of its central characters—brothers Aston and Mick, and the elderly, conniving drifter, Davies, whom Aston invites to stay with them after Davies is involved in a brawl in the café where Davies works. All of the play’s action occurs in the severely restrictive confines of a single room, which results in the men having virtually no exposure to the people or social structures that exist beyond these four walls. Their alienation extends beyond the physical, as well: all three characters have painful, distant, or nonexistent relationships with their families. This includes Aston and Mick’s relationship, which is strained and uncommunicative. Yet in the end, it is Aston and Mick’s unspoken obligation to each other as siblings that allows them to transcend their crippling state of alienation and remove the manipulative, scheming Davies from their home. Their relationship is the closest any of the characters in The Caretaker come to finding meaning and connection. The play thus offers a complicated view of family: it can be a source of alienation and pain in itself, but it can also be a source of comfort and purpose in an otherwise alienating modern world.

The characters’ familial relationships are largely empty and meaningless—if not nonexistent. At one point, Mick calls his father his “uncle’s brother” and hints that his uncle might actually be his father. That he refers to his father in such an indirect, impersonal way and questions the identity of his father altogether suggests that family isn’t always a source of comfort and stability; it can also be a source of confusion and absurdity, to the point that one might not even be sure who their family is. Davies’s relationship with his ex-wife was similarly meaningless: he humorously describes leaving her “no more than a week” after they married because she left a pot of unwashed underwear on the stove. Furthermore, in the present, there’s no indication that Davies, Mick, or Aston have any extended family or even close friends. These shallow, trivial, or nonexistent relationships create the sense that family bonds aren’t inherently close or special. In the society of the play, relationships traditionally viewed as sacred (like those between parent and child or husband and wife) have become nothing more than superficial labels—and in some cases, even those labels are meaningless.

The play also shows how family relationships can be deeply painful and alienating. Before the events of the play, Aston had hallucinations (it’s implied that he was suffering from some sort of mental illness). The acquaintances he confided in about this misunderstood him and got him forcibly committed to a mental hospital, but the way his own mother treated him was even more devastating, as she was the one who signed off on giving Aston electroconvulsive shock therapy. This was something he never expected her to agree to—suggesting that he didn’t know his mother as well as he thought he did—and his botched treatment left him permanently brain damaged, mentally disabled, and traumatized. Aston’s condition is, in a way, a representation of how being misunderstood and betrayed by a family member can be uniquely painful and scarring, and how family can compound rather than relieve the alienation one experiences in society.

Yet despite these dysfunctional relationships, Mick and Aston are loyal to each other, and their relationship is the closest the play comes to offering up a possible source of meaning or purpose. Although the brothers never speak to each other in the play, there are several hints that they have an unspoken bond and care deeply for each other. For one, Mick dreams of one day living with Aston in the building that Mick owns, and he gives Aston the task of renovating it, despite the fact that Mick is a professional builder and Aston isn’t physically or mentally capable of completing this project. He does so because he’s worried about Aston’s stagnancy in life—he wants to get his little brother “going in the world,” even if that means giving him a job that Mick could do better himself. Moreover, at several points in the play, Davies tries to manipulate the brothers by turning them against each other. But Aston is hesitant to go along with Davies’s criticism of Mick, and Mick likewise gets angry when Davies is “hypercritical” of Aston. The brothers’ similar reactions hint at an unspoken bond that transcends the emotional distance between them—one that gives Aston a source of advocacy and support and Mick a source of purpose (he is, in a sense, the play’s titular “caretaker” of Aston). Even though Aston and Mick are not a close family unit on the surface, then, they form a united front against the interloper who wants to undermine their relationship.

In fact, Mick and Aston’s relationship is what eventually gives Aston the strength to remove the manipulative Davies from their lives. In the play’s final scene, Aston enters the room after Mick smashes Aston’s beloved Buddha statue on the floor out of frustration with Davies. He faces Mick, and the two brothers share a silent smile. It’s immediately after this interaction that Aston decisively rejects Davies, ignoring the old man’s threats of violence and attempts at manipulation and literally turning his back on him, forcing the rejected Davies to leave the room once and for all. The solidarity Mick and Aston communicate through their intimate, knowing smile seems to be rooted in an ingrained sense of understanding and loyalty that they feel toward each other as brothers, and this empowers Aston to make good on his intentions—something no character has been able to do up until this moment. When Aston turns his back on Davies, he metaphorically chooses solidarity with Mick over the destructive alienation represented in Davies’s character. With this shift, the play presents a complex and even contradictory view of family: familial relationships can reflect and perpetuate the alienation of the modern world, but they can also give otherwise isolated and vulnerable people a sense of support, strength, and meaningful connection.