Blasted by Sarah Kane
Published 1995 · 80 pages · 12,000 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Drama
How hard is Blasted to read?
Blasted scores 44 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 25 out of 100
- Sparse, blunt language. Kane uses short words and crude speech deliberately. Ian's tabloid vocabulary and Cate's limited articulation are part of the play's meaning.
- Sentence structure: 25 out of 100
- Short sentences, fragments, silences. The syntax is stripped bare, especially in the later scenes where language itself breaks down.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- The play makes its arguments through action rather than words. The connection between domestic and military violence is demonstrated structurally, not explained discursively.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Extremely compressed. Every line and every stage direction carries weight. The play covers an enormous range of experience — domestic abuse, war, atrocity, survival — in under twelve thousand words.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- The explosion of the hotel room represents a radical structural break. The connection between the two halves is implied rather than explained, and the audience must construct the argument.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- The hotel room, the gun, the flowers, the eaten eyes, the dead baby, the food Cate brings — every element is simultaneously literal and symbolic. Kane's imagery is visceral and resonant.
- Ironic distance: 20 out of 100
- No ironic distance whatsoever. Kane presents violence and suffering with absolute directness. The play's refusal of irony is part of what made it so shocking.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- The final image — Cate feeding Ian — is ambiguous. It could be an act of compassion or futility. Kane withholds interpretation while providing a powerful closing image.
- Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
- The rupture between the realistic first half and the war-zone second half is the play's defining structural innovation. The two halves operate by different dramatic logics that the audience must reconcile.
How Blasted is regarded
Blasted holds a literary regard score of 78 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.