Shifting our critical perspective on Sweeney to encounter it temporally rather than spatially (New Critically), we discover an existential content embodied in an Anti-Aristotelian form remarkably similar to the drama of the absurd. Its thematic pattern is that which finds its paradigm in the myth of the Furies and its most articulate phenomenological description in Heidegger: the paradoxical flight from death and, ultimately, Nothingness (the Erinyes) that ends in the saving recognition that death is a benign agent (the Eumenides). The flight, characterized in existential philosophy as the self-deceptive “domestication” of death, is epitomized in the wastelanders effort to transform Sweeney's tale of murder into a well-made detective story. But this impulse is thwarted by Sweeney's refusal to draw a distancing conclusion. This becomes Eliot's formal strategy. Like the Anti-Aristotelian absurdists, he “decomposes” the “time-shape” of his microcosm to prevent the audience from objectifying the dreadful contingency of the world of his play. Eliot's Anti-Aristotelianism, however, is ultimately different from that of the “humanistic” absurdists. Whereas the latter project an absolutely discontinuous “time-shape” grounded in a vision of a radically discontinuous universe, Eliot, who sees the macrocosm as a Nothingness that may be the obverse of Somethingness, projects a discontinuous (circular) “time-shape” that contains the possibility of linear direction.