In the four plays this book investigates (Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Racine's Phedre, and Buchner's Danton's Death), the dramatic hero goes through a process that disrupts his or her consciousness, which in turn is reflected and accentuated by dramatic structure. These changes in mind can be isolated on all levels of dramatic representation: aesthetic, linguistic, and dramaturgical. The ideology resonating in the dramatic world has a special connection with structure, which manifests itself in unique and different ways in the plays. Nevertheless, despite the uniqueness of representation, it is always metonymic structure that seems to parallel the fragmentation of consciousness.