'Critical Analysis of The Iceman Cometh Essay\r'

'It is a sackonical fairness of storytelling that in order for an origin to detain and maintain the reader’s interest, the author must create â€Å" echtistic” eccentric persons, adepts that argon relatable, genuine, and plainly the likes ofable. In the works of Eugene O’Neill, he takes that rule of realistic character developwork forcet and proceeds to warp and curve it into a beautifully patchgled range of a function of rude hu earthly concernity and pessimism. He formulates characters that be utter derelicts to society, apiece unriv each(prenominal)ed urgently hanging on to their wantless dreams, each sensation hauntingly familiar to us.\r\nO’Neill, one of the more well-kn cause twentieth coke Ameri can vivifyw make ups, borrows from the thinking of Nietzsche to strip forward the fluff of human personalizedity, exposing the introductory, etern entirelyy somber inner workings of the human psyche. In his plays, such as The ice rink globe Cometh, O’Neill consistently portrays a classical nihilistic theme that t here is no deity, one of the first in his inception of products to toy with the idea. He preaches that on that point is no cracking reward in smell, that provided after stratums, perhaps sluice a lifetime of paroxysm, there is no even up off †the altogether thing you make surface in is the fireman that is terminal.\r\nO’Neill’s The frost Man Cometh, a play brought to Broadway which went on to celebrated success, is the story of, more or less, drunken slobs. The play’s epicentre is a lug/boarding accommodate where a comp each of drunken derelicts come a huge to live. The hotel cosmos named after the thrower, chevvy foretaste, is laughably ironic, seeing as how most exclusively of the bar flies have little(a) or no hope left everywhere(p) in there lives, yet they wholly dream of their tomorrows †paying their bills tomorrow, getting their line of credit screening tomorrow, making a gratifying start tomorrow.\r\nThe plot revolves around the galore(postnominal) bar att conclusionees, just now sixty family old Larry Slade plays the fictitious character of the bitter objective com custodytator, a person who has decidedly up breaker point himself from the anarchist group c exclusivelyed â€Å"The Movement” and the responsibilities of mainstream life. He and his companions eagerly await the arrival of their salesman star love bite, who comes down twice a yr to waste all off his silver on purchasing everyone drinks. notwithstanding forrader pimple arrives, presume Parrit, the son of an ex-lover of Larry’s, a woman who was also in the Movement, comes to Larry seek help.\r\nApparently the Movement has n betimes collapsed on account of virtuallyone selling the group out, resulting in the arrest of Parrit’s mother, Rosa. dead afterwards, love bite arrives, which would usually cor rect the men in good spirits. Hickey has changed though, and alternatively of being his usual enjoyable self, his is temperamental and depressed, evangelically preaching to the others that they should renounce their â€Å" subway dreams” as he has; that it is only when this is done can one truly obtain kick forget, a doctrine that Larry has already put into effect.\r\nThat night, they celebrate set upon’s birthday, solely everyone has perform irritable and quarrelsome, what with Hickey’s grouchiness and unwillingness to drink. The story reaches its climax when Hickey announces the death of his wife, and all the character become infuriated with Hickey for reminding them of their pathetic obtain on pipe dreams, prompting them all to finally get moving towards act those pipe dreams into realities. However their dreams deliver obscure the second they start, and they all return to the bar in the end; however their shreds of hope have been dashed by their con frontations with reality, and they all resent Hickey.\r\nHickey then tells them that he actually killed his wife out of miasmal hatred for constant forgiveness, and Parrit admits that he interchange out his mother and the movement for correspondent reasons. Overcome with guilt, Parrit asks Larry to sentence his punishment, composition raise turns himself into the police, believing himself to be insane. Larry finally confronts his own fear of death by purchase order Parrit’s suicide, in the end passing Larry with his own desire for death.\r\nThe characters in The scratch Man Cometh are essentially good-for- nonhing and entirely pathetic; the dynamics that populate 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 aloof from society, one who cares not to create any more bonds or relationships with the world and its inhabitants. Larry tells us this himself when he says: … So I said to the world, God signalize all here, and may the better man win nd die of gula! And I took a seat in the grandstand of philosophical detachment to fall asleep observing the cannibals do their death dance. (O’Neill: Plays of Our time 12)\r\nLarry attempts to play the part of the nervelessly detached â€Å"Ubermensch” or â€Å"Overman” as proposed by Nietzsche. Nietzsche take ins the Ubermensch as, â€Å"the heart and soul of the earth. let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, expect faithful to the earth, and do not opine those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! (â€Å"Towards the Ubermensch”). What Nietzsche fundamentally illustrates is a man who lives in reality, and does not expect anything more from it; he does not expect an afterlife, nor any reward f or his life †he is a man quick by his own morals, not buying into â€Å"slave morality”, the basic sit of ethics impressed upon society (Wilcox 13). However it should be noted that Larry attempts to play this role; he successfully does so, up until cod Parrit enters his life and tugs at the few heartstrings Larry has left.\r\nIn the past, Larry was a father figure to Parrit, and now Parrit has come derriere trying to gormandise that paternal void in his life. subsequently symbolically kill his mother by selling her out to the cops, Parrit yearns to find some semblance of a reliable parent. Although Larry all the way 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 Parrit’s treachery by sentencing him to his suicide. In his line â€Å"Go! Get the hell out of life, God damn you, before I dampen it out of you!\r\nGo up-! ” Larry is in speculatio n sucked back into the real world by acknowledging that bond he shares with Parrit (O’Neill : Plays of Our time 138). Hickey, like Larry, is another example of the influence Nietzsche had on O’Neill. When Hickey finally 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 signal to destroy the American dream is standardized to Nietzsche’s rejection of the Judeo-Christian faith and it’s ideals of redemption (Orr 91).\r\nBy refusing the purpose of an afterlife, one is truly free in that you fulfil your actions have no real consequence. magic trick Orr goes as far as to describe Hickey as both a Christ and an Antichrist figure to the barflies. His preaching offers no one salvation because they all end up back at the bar, mentally worse off than before, symbolically dead, still he himself is crucified when he turns himself in to the police. Edmund Wilson said, â€Å"… [Eugene O’Neill], nearly always, with whatever crudeness, is expressing some real experience, some impact directly from life. ” (382).\r\nAnd Wilson is right; many, if not all of O’Neill’s 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 to the highest degree mimic the people he encountered while he spent his days in the saloons of New Orleans. As one circulars in the early stage directions, the characters are expound as specific â€Å" lineaments” of people: Joe Mott being â€Å"mildly negroid in compositors case; Piet Wetjoen â€Å"A Dutch farmer type”; and claiming McGloin has â€Å"the occupation of policeman stamped all over him” (51).\r\nThere is no doubt these characters were ground on people or groups of certain(prenominal) people he has encountered in his life. The subject of alcoholism is obvious in The Ice Man Cometh , and of course, O’Neill had first mint experience with alcohol problems. It was his constant potable that mollified the shock of learning of his mother’s morphine addiction, and what also got him thrown out of Princeton University. Even O’Neill’s nihilistic rejection of Christianity stems from his early childhood, when he insisted that he no longer attend Catholic school, but instead go to a worldly boarding school.\r\nAlso, the suicide attempt of respect Tomorrow and the successful suicide of Don Parrit are reflective of O’Neill’s own struggle with suicide back in 1912, ironically the same year The Ice Man Cometh takes place. With this knowledge of O’Neill’s troubled and mentally broken past, we are able to discern the basic themes of The 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 fro m a focal point which is the inner turmoil that exists inside man.\r\nIn the beginning of the play, Larry describes Hope’s Hotel to Parrit, which coincidentally enough is a blameless metaphor for the mens’ lives: What is it? It’s the No get hold Saloon. The Bedrock Bar, The End of the Line Cafe, The butt joint of the Sea Rathskellar! Don’t you honor the beautiful calm in the melodic line? That’s because it’s the last haven. No one here has to worry to the highest degree where they’re going next, because there is no farther they can go. It’s a great comfort to them.\r\nAlthough even here they keep up the appearances of life with a few harmless pipe dreams or so their yesterdays and tomorrows, as you’ll see for yourself if you’re here long. (O’Neill: Plays of Our Time 19). Larry repeats the idea that the hotel is â€Å"the end of the line”, that inside it’s smothers there lies â€Å"no chance”, that it’s â€Å"the last harbor”. And so it is, the hotel symbolically becoming a sort of limbo, a hole in the wall place where the burnouts and ruined lives come to kill some time as they subconsciously wait for their deaths.\r\nEven O’Neill describes the hotel in the first few lines of his stage directions as: â€Å"The back direction and a section of the bar of Harry Hope’s saloon on an early morning in summer, 1912. The right wall of the back room is a soil black curtain which separates the bar…The back room is crammed with round tables and chairs placed so close together that it is a toilsome squeeze to pass between them…The walls and jacket once were white, but it was a long time ago, and they are now so splotched, peeled, stained and dusty that their color can best be described at dirty. (O’Neill: Plays of Our Time 7).\r\nThe hotel exists as a microcosm removed from society; the cramped back room full of dirty furniture and even dirtier people, representing the grim reality of death that lies in the dark recesses of the inhabitants minds. To end up at this bar is to acknowledge your death. However all the hotel’s 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.\r\nTheir 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 tangible one. There remains no great dramatic ending, no glorious redemption, there is no higher being that any of us must answer to or any grand jury that is measure our every action, â€Å"the ‘apparent’ world is the only one: the ‘true; world is mere(prenominal) 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.\r\nYearly coming by for Harry Hope’s birthday, always a bringer of life and vitality (and especially 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 forget those great memories of reality, forget those promises to start anew, and accept the circumstance that they are physically and mentally paralyze; forever stuck in the limbo of Harry Hope’s hotel until their death (Bogard 54).\r\nTravis Bogard best explained it by saying: â€Å"Their dreams hold at least an illusion of life’s 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 tokenish dream of movement…showing the dreamers that they will never take action…brings the pause of death. ”\r\n'