What is the signifacnce of Lebeau in Incident at Vichy by Arthur Miller?

Lebeau, in Miller's play Incident at Vichy,
is a character who is ruled by fear. He is twenty-five years old, a painter
by trade, and does not care much about his personal
appearance.

In 1939, as Hitler is approaching France,
Lebeau is ready to leave for America, but, sadly, his mother cannot bear to part with
their furniture and they miss the opportunity to
escape.

Lebeau tries to cling to the hope that the Nazis do
not have any other agenda other than to ferret out spies or to seize workers for their
coal mines. Of course, this is delusional.

As the
characters all await their summons to the Detention Room to be interrogated to determine
if they are Jewish, they take turns speculating about what will happen, and perhaps more
importantly, why it is
happening.

Lebeau offers what is perhaps the most
reasonable explanation of the atrocity: there is no explanation. There is no point in
suffering, no grand lesson to be learned, internalized, or enacted. He talks about the
lack of meaning in his own paintings and how people try to find a pattern or a message
within the abstract. There isn't one, and there isn't one here, he
argues.

Lebeau's significance, then, is that he brings the
voice of the Existentialist to the play. In the early 19th century, the philosopher
Soren Kierkegaard argued that only the individual can determine meaning for his life
alone, and that there is no avoiding obstacles such as despair and absurdity. Lebeau,
though fearful, subscribes to this philosophy. Leduc, who also awaits his fate, comes to
believe in much the same way. He says to the others, "You cannot wager your life on a
purely rational analysis of this situation. Listen to your feelings: you must certainly
feel the danger here.”

The only way
for an Existentialist to overcome obstacles is to face them. This is what Lebeau and
Leduc are trying to do.