His first two plays, The Bald Soprano and The Lesson both end with scenes that repeat the action of the first scene, creating a sense of cycles and the infinite loops that these stories can take even with their lack of logic. The Bald Soprano tells the story of two couples and the final tableau is the same as the first tableau with the opposite couple substituted in. Ionesco did this to show the interchangeable nature of the couples, which ruins any illusion of the importance of their individual identity. In The Lesson, the play ends with the tutor killing his student and the next student arriving. There is no sense of an end to any of these cycles.

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The Chairs is a great example of Ionesco’s fascination with the absence of logic and absence of anything. He sets his audience up for spectacle only to leave them with nothing. In this play his characters wait onstage for an Orator to arrive to deliver an important message, possibly the meaning of life. The two old characters talk to many “guests” who never appear onstage. He wrote that the audience “must not be able to say, for example, that the old couple are mad or in their dotage and suffering from hallucinations; neither must they be able to say that the invisible characters are only the old couple’s remorse and memories… the interest lies elsewhere….The tightly packed crowd of nonexistent beings should acquire an entirely objective existence of their own” (Hayman 52). This play also shows the beginnings of Ionesco’s interest in stage images as part of the plot. The play ends with the Orator arriving and only being able to speak in gibberish to a set of empty chairs. There is a sound cue at this moment that is the sound of an audience even though there is no one on stage and Ionesco found this to be the most important moment of the play because it staged absence itself.

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An idea Ionesco references often in his books and interviews is the sense that society is becoming a machine, mirroring the industrialization occurring throughout Europe and America. He said in an interview, "A machine that gets out of control is a machine that works too well, so well that everything is turned into part of the machine" (Hayman 25). His play Rhinoceros is his best example of this phenomenon. It shows how the society is metamorphosed from humans to rhinoceros’ and had strong parallels to the political climate of the time in which Ionesco watched many of his friends who had once fought against fascism become fascists.

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Amédée was Ionesco’s first full-length play and it examined death, a favorite topic of Ionesco. In his Fragments… he writes that “we are in life in order to die” (Ionesco 25). This is one of many passages in his journals about death and his realization and rejection of its existence. He writes, "it's to Death, above all, that I say 'Why?' with such terror. Death alone can, and will, close my mouth" (Ionesco 27). He also said in an interview, “Death is unacceptable and the conditions existing in heaven are almost equally unacceptable if our condition is reflected in that of heaven“ (Hayman 16).  His pessimistic and dismissive view of death is reflected in many of his plays with Amédée being his first venture into the topic. This play follows the story of a corpse that grows continually throughout the play in a small apartment. It is based on a short story Ionesco wrote which allowed him to realize the idea of the story without having to worry about staging it. This first exploration of death on stage spurred Ionesco on to many of his other projects examining this lifelong question.

Another play that examined death was Exit the King. Ionesco wrote this play in just 20 days, 10 while he was ill and 10 more a few weeks later after he had declined in health and then recovered again. One of the most interesting parts of this play is the dramatic shift in rhythms between the first second parts, written two weeks apart separated by Ionesco’s declining health. Ionesco describes it as “an attempt at an apprenticeship in dying” (Hayman 128). The marked shift in rhythm is intended to be acknowledged as a part of the story instead of seen as a problem. Ionesco’s own experience with death greatly influenced the writing of this piece and unlike his other pieces, which were explorations of an idea or based on his short stories, this piece was based on his idea for a ballet.