María Alejandra Gutiérrez-Torres, MD, MA
Michel de Montaigne used to say that the best lives are those lived without miracles or extravagances, with full awareness of our limits. Perhaps there is something deeply human in this modesty. To know that we are limited, contradictory, vulnerable, and still choose to live as human beings anyway. There is something beautiful in this idea of accepting our limits without giving up on ourselves. It is also, I think, a useful way into Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. At first glance, the play can be read as a sharp criticism of totalitarianism, conformity, and the frightening ease with which human beings can surrender their individuality to a collective idea. But beneath that criticism, there is something much more hopeful. Rhinoceros is also a glimpse of what remains possible when everything seems to be moving in the opposite direction: the possibility of remaining human.
What makes the play so powerful is that Ionesco does not imagine humanity as something guaranteed. Being human is not presented as a permanent condition, secured simply because we were born human. It is something fragile, something that can be compromised by fear, by certainty, by the desire to belong, by the temptation to stop questioning. But precisely because it can be lost, it can also be consciously chosen. In a world where everyone seems to be becoming the same, the possibility of saying no becomes extraordinarily meaningful.
Ionesco leaves us with a generous and more demanding possibility: that we can become aware of our own vulnerability and still choose differently. This is why Bérenger’s final words matter so much. “I’ll remain what I am. I will not capitulate!” He does not say this because he knows he will win. There is no guarantee that the world will return to what it was, that the rhinoceroses will disappear, or that anyone will recognize his choice as heroic. He simply decides that, whatever happens, he will remain human. That is not victory in the conventional sense. It is responsibility without guarantee. But perhaps there is hope precisely in that: sometimes the meaning of an ethical choice does not depend on knowing what will come after it.
Seeing these ideas embodied on stage made them feel even more immediate. The actors’ gradual shift from disbelief to acceptance makes conformity feel less like a sudden choice and more like something that happens almost imperceptibly. The staging similarly allowed the rhinoceroses to move from an absurd interruption to an increasingly ordinary presence. What is extraordinary becomes familiar and what is familiar becomes normal. In that sense, the production does more than illustrate Ionesco’s argument, it makes the audience experience it. We are invited to feel how easily our perception of what is “normal” can change, and, consequently, how much courage it can take to remain apart from it.
As the Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater writes, humanity is something we have to continually choose. I think Rhinoceros offers a theatrical version of that same idea. It reminds us that choosing humanity does not mean believing that human beings are always good, rational, or just. It means continuing to believe that we are capable of becoming better, and acting as though that possibility matters.
This is why the play does not have to leave us discouraged. It is not a call to discouragement, much less an invitation to pessimism. And perhaps, in a time when certainty can be so seductive, even the pretension of objectivity becomes a form of courage, a willingness to look again, to question ourselves, to resist the comfort of the crowd.
In the end, Rhinoceros does not promise that humanity will prevail. It offers something quieter and, perhaps, more valuable: the reminder that we still have a choice. And as long as we can choose, there is hope.
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