Critical Analysis of The Iceman Cometh Essay

It is a fundamental law of storytelling that in order for an author to capture and handle the readers interest, the author must pee hard-nosed characters, wizards that be relatable, genuine, and plainly likeable. In the works of Eugene ONeill, he induces that rule of realistic character develop custodyt and proceeds to warp and twist it into a attractively mangled paradigm of raw humaneity and pessimism. He formulates characters that atomic number 18 babble out derelicts to society, severally one desperately hanging on to their hopeless dreams, each one hauntingly familiar to us.ONeill, one of the more well-kn ingest twentieth century American shoo-inwrights, borrows from the thinking of Nietzsche to strip away the fluff of human per passwordality, exposing the basic, eternally somber midland workings of the human psyche. In his figure outs, such as The methamphetamine hydrochloride musical composition Cometh, ONeill consistently portrays a spotless nihilistic them e that at that place is no deity, one of the first in his field to toy with the idea. He preaches that there is no great compensate in liveness, that even after years, perhaps even a aliveness of suffering, there is no pay off the nonwithstanding thing you take scratch off is the relief that is destruction.ONeills The Ice patch Cometh, a play brought to Broadway which went on to celebrated success, is the story of, more or less, drunken slobs. The plays epicenter is a bar/ boarding house where a theme of drunken derelicts chafferm to live. The hotel being named after the owner, get to Hope, is preposterously ironic, seeing as how most all of the bar flies pass on little or no hope left in there lives, yet they all dream of their tomorrows paying their bills tomorrow, getting their job foul tomorrow, making a fresh start tomorrow.The plot revolves around the m both bar aidees, but sixty year old Larry Slade plays the lineament of the red-hot objective commentat or, a person who has decidedly removed himself from the anarchist group called The bm and the responsibilities of mainstream life. He and his companions eagerly await the arrival of their salesman fri demolition love bite, who comes down twice a year to waste all off his property on buying everyone drinks. However before love bite arrives, founding father Parrit, the son of an ex-loer of Larrys, a woman who was also in the Movement, comes to Larry seeking help.Appargonntly the Movement has nearly collapsed on account of roughone selling the group out, resulting in the arrest of Parrits mother, Rosa. Shortly afterwards, Hickey arrives, which would usually put the men in good spirits. Hickey has changed though, and instead of being his usual pleasurable self, his is sullen and depressed, evangelically preaching to the others that they should renounce their scream dreams as he has that it is only when this is done can one authentically obtain free will, a doctrine that Larry h as already put into effect.That night, they celebrate Harrys birthday, but everyone has become irritable and quarrel many, what with Hickeys grouchiness and unwillingness to drink. The story reaches its mop up when Hickey announces the close of his wife, and all the character become infuriated with Hickey for reminding them of their pathetic grasp on pipe dreams, prompting them all to in the end get moving towards turning those pipe dreams into realities. However their dreams fall apart the second they start, and they all return to the bar in the end as yet their shreds of hope have been dashed by their confrontations with reality, and they all resent Hickey.Hickey then tells them that he actually killed his wife out of sheer nuisance for constant forgiveness, and Parrit admits that he sold out his mother and the movement for equal reasons. Overcome with guilt, Parrit asks Larry to sentence his punishment, plot Harry turns himself into the police, believing himself to be ins ane. Larry in conclusion confronts his own fear of death by ordering Parrits self-annihilation, in the end leaving Larry with his own desire for death.The characters in The Ice Man Cometh are essentially sad and entirely pathetic the dynamics that baffle between them seem so raw and primitive that it borders on the unreal. Although containing a well-sized cast, the play mainly focuses on the interactions between Larry, Parrit and Hickey (Bogard 51). From the beginning of the play, we are introduced to Larry as a man removed from society, one who cares not to create any more bonds or relationships with the instauration and its inhabitants. Larry tells us this himself when he says So I said to the world, god bless all here, and may the surmount man win nd die of gluttony And I took a seat in the grandstand of philosophical detachment to fall sound asleep(predicate) observing the cannibals do their death dance. (ONeill Plays of Our time 12)Larry attempts to play the part of th e casually detached Ubermensch or Overman as proposed by Nietzsche. Nietzsche describes the Ubermensch as, the kernel of the earth. Let your will say the overman shall be the meaning of the earth I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who announce to you of otherworldly hopes (Towards the Ubermensch). What Nietzsche basically illustrates is a man who lives in reality, and does not expect anything more from it he does not expect an afterlife, nor any rejoin for his life he is a man living by his own morals, not buying into slave morality, the basic set of morals impressed upon society (Wilcox 13). However it should be noted that Larry attempts to play this role he successfully does so, up until Don Parrit enters his life and tugs at the a couple of(prenominal) heartstrings Larry has left.In the past, Larry was a father figure to Parrit, and now Parrit has come tooshie trying to fill that paternal void in his life. After symbolically killing his mother by selling her out to the cops, Parrit yearns to find some semblance of a reliable parent. Although Larry clearly declares his new outlook on life, he is eventually convinced by Hickey to kill that pipe dream of his, his own fear of death, and takes responsibility for Parrits betrayal by sentencing him to his suicide. In his line Go Get the hell out of life, God damn you, before I choke it out of youGo up- Larry is in theory sucked back into the real world by acknowledging that bond he shares with Parrit (ONeill Plays of Our time 138). Hickey, like Larry, is another example of the influence Nietzsche had on ONeill. When Hickey in the long run returns, he preaches to the rest of the men to give up their dreams, and it is only then can one be totally free. This sudden quest to destroy the American dream is similar to Nietzsches rejection of the Judeo-Christian faith and its ideals of redemption (Orr 91).By refusing the notion of an afterlife, one is truly free i n that you realize your actions have no real consequence. nates Orr goes as far as to describe Hickey as both(prenominal) a Christ and an Antichrist figure to the barflies. His preaching offers no one redemption because they all end up back at the bar, mentally worse off than before, symbolically dead, but he himself is crucified when he turns himself in to the police. Edmund Wilson said, Eugene ONeill, nearly always, with whatever crudeness, is expressing some real experience, some impact today from life. (382).And Wilson is right many, if not all of ONeills plays serve as a personal reflection of his thoughts and experiences in life. In cases like The Ice Man Cometh, Bogard suggests that the characters he writes about mimic the people he encountered while he spent his days in the saloons of New Orleans. As one notices in the early stage directions, the characters are described as specific types of people Joe Mott being mildly negroid in type Piet Wetjoen A Dutch farmer typ e and claiming McGloin has the occupation of policeman stamped all over him (51).There is no doubt these characters were based on people or groups of certain people he has encountered in his life. The motif of alcoholism is unambiguous in The Ice Man Cometh, and of course, ONeill had first hand experience with alcohol problems. It was his constant drinking that mollified the shock of learning of his mothers morphine addiction, and what also got him thrown out of Princeton University. Even ONeills nihilistic rejection of Christianity stems from his early childhood, when he insisted that he no longer attend Catholic school, but instead go to a secular boarding school.Also, the suicide attempt of Jimmy Tomorrow and the successful suicide of Don Parrit are reflective of ONeills own struggle with suicide back in 1912, ironically the same year The Ice Man Cometh takes place. With this knowledge of ONeills troubled and mentally disturbed past, we are able to discern the basic themes of Th e Ice Man Cometh. However this in itself is no easy task, the play is multi-layered, dealing with themes that involve dreams of death, and the existence of God however they all stem from a focal point which is the inner turmoil that exists within man.In the beginning of the play, Larry describes Hopes Hotel to Parrit, which coincidentally enough is a perfect metaphor for the mens lives What is it? Its the No chance Saloon. The Bedrock Bar, The End of the Line Cafe, The Bottom of the Sea Rathskellar Dont you notice the beautiful calm in the atmosphere? Thats because its the outlive think of. No one here has to worry about where theyre going next, because there is no farther they can go. Its a great comfort to them.Although even here they keep up the appearances of life with a few harmless pipe dreams about their yesterdays and tomorrows, as youll see for yourself if youre here long. (ONeill Plays of Our quantify 19). Larry repeats the idea that the hotel is the end of the line, t hat at bottom its walls there lies no chance, that its the last harbor. And so it is, the hotel symbolically becoming a sort of limbo, a fuddle in the wall place where the burnouts and ruined lives come to kill some time as they subconsciously wait for their deaths.Even ONeill describes the hotel in the first few lines of his stage directions as The back manner and a section of the bar of Harry Hopes saloon on an early morning in summer, 1912. The right wall of the back mode is a dirty black curtain which separates the barThe back mode is crammed with round tables and chairs placed so close together that it is a herculean squeeze to pass between themThe walls and ceiling once were white, but it was a long time ago, and they are now so splotched, peeled, stained and shabby that their color can best be described at dirty. (ONeill Plays of Our Time 7).The hotel exists as a microcosm removed from society the cramped back room full of dirty furniture and even dirtier people, repre senting the grim reality of death that lies in the dark recesses of the inhabitants minds. To end up at this bar is to notice your death. However all the hotels inhabitants hold on to their pipe dreams, their last great memories of reality, all making empty promises to get back on their feet. However, they still sit, waiting for the relief of death.Their relief is that they can finally end the suffering of day-to-day existence and leave this earth. Nietzsche pushes the notion that the only world that truly exists is the physical one. There remains no great hammy ending, no glorious redemption, there is no higher being that any of us must answer to or any grand venire that is weighing our every action, the apparent world is the only one the straight world is mere added by a lie (Wilcox 73). These men finally meet their death-bringer when salesman Theodore Hickman, to them known as Hickey, enters the hotel.Yearly coming by for Harry Hopes birthday, always a bringer of life and vit ality (and particularly alcohol), Larry and the others notice a gross change in Hickey. He begins to unnervingly preach the glory of killing your pipe dreams. Hickey convinces the drunkards to parry those great memories of reality, forget those promises to start anew, and accept the fact that they are physically and mentally paralyzed forever stuck in the limbo of Harry Hopes hotel until their death (Bogard 54).Travis Bogard best explained it by saying Their dreams hold at least an whoremaster of lifes essence movement in purposive action. Action, to be sure, will never be taken, but the dreams reveal a basic human truth to foster life, man must preserve a minimal dream of movementshowing the dreamers that they will never take actionbrings the peace of death.