[The following essay contends that The Zoo Story "might well be seen as a portrayal of a ritual confrontation with death and alienation in which Jerry acts the role of shaman/ guide who directs the uninitiated Peter through the initiatory rite necessary for Peter to achieve his maturity and autonomy."]

Although variously explained as a sociopolitical tract, a pessimistic analysis of human alienation, a modern Christian allegroy of salvation, and an example of absurdist and nihilist theater, Albee's The Zoo Story has managed to absorb these perspectives without exhausting its many levels of meaning with the result that much of the critical controversy which has surrounded the play since its American premier in January 1960 has remained unresolved.¹ However, Albee himself provides what is possibly the best framework for understanding his first play when he speaks of his attempt to depict through his drama the danger of a life lived without "the cleansing consciousness of death."² Thus, The Zoo Story might well be seen as a portrayal of a ritual confrontation with death and alienation in which Jerry acts the role of shaman/guide who directs the uninitiated Peter through the initiatory rite necessary for Peter to achieve his maturity and autonomy.

Such rituals are, of course, associated with the entering into adulthood and the leaving behind of childish ways. Peter's lack of development and, hence, his need for initiation are immediately apparent in several ways. He is, for instance, relatively inarticulate and unassertive. He tells Jerry, "I'm normally… reticent" and "I don't express myself too well, sometimes."³ His responses, when he does give them, tend to be formulaic, showing him to be for the most part a rather unthinking spokesman for the unexamined attitudes of his social class. In his parroting of these values and attitudes, Peter demonstrates the passive acceptance of a child rather than the independence of thought which should characterize an adult. In contrast, the much more linguistically flexible Jerry consistently finds occasion to mock not only Peter's thoughts but the awkwardness and rigidity with which they are expressed. Thus, to Peter's admission of his own feelings of paternal inadequacy because "… naturally, every man wants a son" (p. 16), Jerry employs the cliché, "But that's the way the cookie crumbles." Jerry, whom the stage directions describe here as"lightly mocking," has as his purpose not an attack on Peter's virility or ability to "produce" sons, but rather a mocking challenge of Peter's unquestioning ("naturally") belief in the myths of that virility as well as the emotionless and thoughtless manner of its expression. Similarly, the interchange which is generated through Peter's citation of Time magazine reveals the great extent to which Peter's thought is derivative. Peter, himself, self-consciously jokes, "I'm in publishing, not writing" (p. 20). Infant-like, in that he has no real language of his own, Peter has no way of articulating his personal feelings and sensibilities, and without that ability, Peter, it may be argued, lacks any real identity or place within his world. What Jerry effects within the play is the initiation of Peter into an adult world of feelings and the responsibilities which are attendant with their expression.

Jerry sums up Peter's character in one line: "You're a very sweet man and you're possessed of a truly enviable innocence" (p. 23). Peter maintains this innocence by remaining almost completely passive to two forces he has subliminally set up as displaced "parent" figures. Because Peter has invested these figures with such enormous power over the course of his life, they have become for him deterministic structures with seemingly independent lives of their own. The first, his wife, presides over the domestic realm; as a maternal symbol whose individual characteristics remain significantly vague, she seems to exert an influence on Peter which corresponds to the maternal paraphernalia he uses to define himself. The second of these "parental" forces, the essentially male defined and controlled social structure, is the patriarchal authority to which Peter remains obedient. One has, of course, already witnessed Peter's adherence to this authority in the form of his "natural" desire for a son.

Because of his adherence to the forms of that authority, much has been said of Peter as the Man.⁴ However, the emphasis has usually been placed on his moral blindness and guilt, the emphasis usually been has blindness and guilt, which critics have seen as represented by the glasses he cleans and puts on at the opening of the play Like most of Albee's symbols, the glasses cannot be limited to a single meaning. Peter is certainly blind to the real world, but he is also an "onlooker" to life in general and to his own life in particular. The price he pays for the protection of his social place (his "cage" according to the metaphor Albee employs) is his identity which, already severely dwarfed, is at the point of being completely obliterated. He is, consequently, in a serious personal crisis; his glasses also imply, therefore, that he is searching for something.

Hints of Peter's dissatisfaction with his own life become apparent as soon as Jerry begins his interrogation/conversation. Within the play, Peter's bench quickly becomes the focal point of the complex web of contradictory desires and fears, intentions and obsessions competing beneath the character's surface rationalizations. When threatened with the loss of the bench late in the play, Peter desperately attempts to articulate the value which the bench has come to have for him: "I sit on this bench almost every Sunday afternoon, in good weather. It's secluded here; there's never anyone sitting here, so I have it all to myself" (p. 41). He cannot, as yet, consciously appreciate that his weekly sojourn in the park is a small but symbolically significant gesture violating the role of group man. This is the one way Peter has devised to detach himself from the larger group.

Once outside the parameters of his socioeconomic class, however, Peter risks isolation (immediately suggested by the image of a man sitting alone at a bench in the middle of a large city) by calling attention to himself (becoming "obtrusive") and being approached by someone outside his usual milieu. Because Peter recoils from these risks, the bench symbolizes both his desire for autonomy and the crutch he clings to in his effort to go just so far but no further. Peter has been coming to his bench, as he says, "for years" (p. 45), years in which he has maintained his habit as a compromise between freedom and security. Much later in the play, after he has narrated his experience with the dog, Jerry describes the type of emotional sterility, perhaps even death, which results from this kind of reasonable, decorous compromise. In speaking of his renewed relationship with the dog, Jerry says, "And what has been the result: the dog and I have attained a compromise, more of a bargain, really. We neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each other" (p. 36). The commentary applies as well to Peter's lifetime avoidance of pain and risk, an attitude which Jerry challenges by forcing Peter to violate the carefully laid down limits of decorum with which he has circumscribed himself. The action of The Zoo Story is, consequently, Peter's rite of exorcism: chaotic, disorienting, generally disruptive in nature, meant to sever his dependencies and to return to Peter the individual's control over his own life which is traditionally practiced by adult members of society. In it, Albee provides a model of a process offering the possibility for meaningful existence in the modern world, a process in which pain is not only unavoidable but is, in the end, regenerative.

In his capacity as shaman of this rite, Jerry, significantly orphaned and socially outcast, appears to Peter as the "Other," or double—the embodiment of characteristics Peter has designated as antithetical to himself. The physical differences between the characters immediately and visually define them as polar and complementary. Peter, although "moving into middle age," dresses and acts in such a way as to "suggest a man younger," while Jerry, though actually younger, has fallen from physical grace and has a "great weariness" suggesting age (p. 11). Peter in his innocence and Jerry in his "over-sanity" (Albee's term) both lack completeness; each provides the other with a "missing half." Robert Bennett has pointed out that, though most critics see the pair as polar opposites, "Jerry approaches Peter.… as an enlightened brother."⁵ Actually, both evaluations are true. As is the case with doubles, the characters are irrevocably linked and set apart by means of their antithetical characteristics.

The double in literature tends to emerge in the consciousness of the first self (in this case, Peter) at the moment of crisis for the purpose of effecting some major change.⁶ C. G. Jung's terminology for this second self—"the immortal within the mortal man" and "the long expected friend of the soul"⁷—interestingly echoes Jerry's intimation that, on at least some level, his arrival was not completely expected:

Jerry: Peter, do I annoy you, or confuse you?

Peter: (lightly) Well, I must confess that this wasn't the kind of afternoon I'd anticipated.

Jerry: YOU mean I wasn't the gentleman you were expecting.

Peter: I wasn't expecting anybody.

Jerry: NO, I don't imagine you were. But I'm here, and I'm not leaving.

(pp. 37-38)

Ultimately, the appearance of such doubles presupposes the presence, both in the individual and the society which he represents, of a natural psychic equilibrium which of necessity attempts to reassert itself. Whether consciously or unconsciously summoned, Jerry responds to Peter's subliminal attraction to individually, a-rationality, and rebellion by playing "dark twin" to Peter's "favored son." Since Peter's personal identity is at stake, Jerry is a call for renewal generated by Peter's own psyche. This explains why Peter does not leave, although he is clearly annoyed by Jerry's presence. Peter's summoning of Jerry is also seen in the hints of Jerry's own lack of free will in shaping the events which take place during their encounter.

In his dealings with Peter, Jerry seems to be following a format with an outcome so inevitable that it may be prophesied almost as soon as he encounters Peter: "You'll read about it in the papers tomorrow, if you don't see it on your T.v. tonight" (p. 15). Jerry's plan seems less the product of his own invention than the result of some other-worldly revelation. Although, from the outset, Jerry appears to have an inchoate understanding of the inevitability of his meeting with Peter, it is not until these inevitabilities have played themselves out that he is able to acknowledge his complicity with them: "I think that while I was at the zoo I decided that I would walk north … northerly rather … until I found you… or somebody… and I decided that I would talk to you … I would tell you things … and the things that I would tell you would… well, here we are. You see? Here we are. But … I don't know … could I have planned all this? No … no, I couldn't have. But I think I did … and now you'll know what you'll see in your T.V." (p. 48). None of this is meant to suggest that Jerry is simply a volitionless symbol. On the contrary, as the above speech suggests, he is a fully dimensional character with complex motivations of his own. Yet Albee, at his best, can masterfully create characters who are both surrealistically dream-like and perfectly realistic. In this play, Peter and Jerry reveal different aspects of one personality and represent very real people in a very real situation. Peter's reactions to Jerry both correspond to struggles within himself and are realistic responses to the situation which Jerry creates.

By creating the situation, or argument, over the bench, Jerry forces Peter to acknowledge the existence of his other half, so that what has been a continuous monologue for Jerry at last becomes a clearly polarized debate, the prerequisite for resolution. As the archetypal "stranger," Jerry intrudes on Peter's solitude, his personal affairs and, most importantly, his bench. In doing so, Jerry forces Peter to consider the value which he has invested in his personal symbol. In the face of Jerry's challenge for proprietorship of the bench, Peter's dilemma becomes increasingly difficult. If on the one hand he cedes the bench to Jerry without putting up any sort of struggle, Peter will be renouncing his one claim to personal distinction and succumb completely to his stereotypic role of child-like passivity. On the other hand, confrontation with Jerry will force him to acknowledge both the reality of his own will and the existence of a contradictory reality threatening to his identification with a collective structure. Jerry, priest and playwright, orchestrates the ritual/drama between them in order to externalize Peter's internal conflict and force a choice on Peter's part. Choice implies personal responsibility, which is the hallmark of the initiated adult. For his own part, Jerry, in presiding over the rite through which Peter enters the world of the initiated, goes on to gain an identity or definition of himself. He is shaman or guide in the initiatory rites, and, indeed, Jerry consistently acts as though he were the keeper of mystical secrets which he can only just share with his unenlightened counterpart.

Much of the stage action in The Zoo Story does bear the mark of ritual. And while there is an implicit connection between all drama and ritual, Albee seems to call special attention to this connection within The Zoo Story. Jerry's actions when he catalogues his possessions and when he relates the parable of the dog "as if reading from a billboard" (p. 30), ending with an incantation that is a kind of litany and invocation, are explicitly ritualistic. Throughout the play, Jerry also employs Biblical language, combining it with a speech pattern so vernacular that the juxtaposition emphasizes a dichotomy between sacred and profane, the spiritual and the temporal—a dichotomy which Jerry will eventually resolve. The ritualistic quality of the play is also conveyed through its setting—"a place apart" (p. 11)—where, should Peter yell, no one would hear him—and in Albee's suggestion of how Jerry should use space on stage: "The following long speech, it seems to me, should be done with a great deal of action, to achieve a hypnotic effect on Peter, and on the audience, too" (p. 29). Accordingly, Jerry tends to direct his own actions during his long monologue as if following a dance or ritualistic scheme: "I'll start walking around in a little while, and eventually I'll sit down" (p. 19).⁸

The key element of Jerry's ritual, the story of himself and the dog, contains all of the elements that have long been recognized as parts of the mythic quest. The hero, Jerry, must gain admittance to a certain place which has associations with the underworld. He is prevented first by an old crone (his landlady). Once he gets past her by repeating the right formula, he is accosted by a "raging beast" (the dog) which he must either tame or kill. Having undergone these ordeals, he can resume his place in the real or everyday world with the possession of some new knowledge and understanding. Significantly, Jerry defines this as "something to do with how sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly" (p. 21).

Moreover, the mythic aspects of Jerry's tale are brought into high relief by the fact that the rooming house clearly has symbolic associations with the underworld; it is a place full of obvious outcasts, people somehow "dead" to most of society, as Peter admits: "It's so … unthinkable. I find it hard to believe that people such as that really are" (p. 28). This underworld is, in turn, connected to the unconscious. Jerry's rooming house in Albee's first play functions much like Miss Alice's house does in Tiny Alice—as a dream-like center of mystery. As with Miss Alice's house, it is a place with many rooms and levels, having four stories. Jerry lives on the top floor, the place closest to consciousness. The rooms are all "laughably small," separate from each other, and "better as you go down, floor by floor" into unknown territory (p. 22). Jerry carefully points out that he does not know "any of the people on the third and second floors" (p. 27). As he says of one of the unknown rooms, "there's somebody lives there, but I don't know who it is. I've never seen who it is. Never, never ever" (p. 22).

Significantly, within primitive rites of initiation, the novice is often led into a house representing a microcosm of society or of human consciousness. The initiate's entrance into such a house is his symbolic installation at the center of the universe. Anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep in Rites of Passage defines the first step in this type of initiation as the rite of separation.⁹ Typically, the hero must encounter the labyrinth separating him from his former life. The entrance into new life is symbolized as passing through a door, since to cross a threshold is to unite oneself with a new world. Thus, Jerry draws specific attention to his place of confrontation with the dog: "And where better, where better to communicate one single, simple-minded idea than in an entrance hall? Where? It would be a start! Where better to make a beginning … to understand and just possibly be understood" (italics added) (p. 35).

The landlady and her dog are guardians of the threshold, and, as in the traditional quest format, they must be honored and appeased. The former, a displaced sybil-figure, personifies the seductress and the witch. Jerry describes her as a "fat, ugly, mean, stupid, unwashed, misanthropic, cheap, drunken bag of garbage" who comes after him with her "sweaty lust" (p. 28). Usually this figure tries to prevent the seeker's entrance into the place which is the source of knowledge. If the person has the right information—such as the knowledge of the labyrinth design, the right password, or if he makes the right request—he finds his road easily. If not, the woman devours him.¹⁰ Jerry, however, has found the formula to undercut her power: "But I have found a way to keep her off. When she presses herself to my body and mumbles about her room and how I should come there, I merely say: but, Love; wasn't yesterday enough for you, and the day before?" (p. 28).

Yet Jerry, as questing hero, must also find a way to avoid the dog who functions as an avatar of the monstrous landlady when she, herself, is not present. To be sure, the dog is an extension of the landlady; in fact, they look alike: "She had forgotten her bewildered lust, and her eyes were wide open for the first time. They looked like the dog's eyes" (p. 32). Traditionally, dogs have been associated in mythology with the priesthood of Great Mother figures and the "Male votaries of the Great Goddess who prostituted themselves in her name."¹¹ Like its owner, the dog in The Zoo Story is bent on devouring Jerry: "this dog wasn't indifferent. From the very beginning he'd snarl and then go for me, to get one of my legs. Not like he was rabid you know; he was sort of a stumbly dog, but he wasn't half-assed either. It was a good stumbly run; but I always got away … (Puzzles) I still don't know to this day how the other roomers manage it, but you know what I think: I think it had to do only with me" (p. 30), and like its owner, it can only be appeased with a symbolic offering. Jerry, as we learn, makes an effort to appease the dog by offering it various pieces of food with pretended good will. In the cases of both the landlady and her pet, the offering is a fiction, pretended sexual encounters and pretended good will, which is designed to act as a symbolic substitute for the sacrifice of Jerry. In each case, the fiction is created in order to prevent the rendering of the desired object which is, literally, Jerry's flesh. Yet such sacrifices or substitutions ultimately prove to be unsatisfactory. Jerry, in his desperation, attempts to do away with the canine sentry who blocks his free entry into the rooming house by placing poison in one of the "offerings" which he makes to the dog which he calls "a descendant of the puppy that guarded the gates of hell or some such resort" (p. 33).

The result of this act is to place Jerry in the next stage of the initiatory process. In the format of primitive rites of initiation, the ordeal for the novice typically has four basic stages which lead to his rebirth as a new, mature individual: separation from his mother and from his counterparts, confrontation with danger and death, hallucination or loss of consciousness with a resultant identification with the external world, and, finally, an inevitable sense of loss upon the return to the world of ordinary consciousness. As we have already seen, Jerry is set apart by both the landlady and her dog and has been locked in a desperate struggle to avoid being consumed or subsumed by his adversaries. The essence of Jerry's struggle has been the preservation of his preinitiatory identity. However, with the events following the poisoning and recovery of the dog, both Jerry and the dog are transformed by a seeming merging of their separate consciousnesses and the creation of a new knowledge or understanding between them. The possibility of the dog's recovery creates in Jerry the expectation of a transformation: "I wanted the dog to live so that I could see what our new relationship might come to" (p. 33).

That new relationship is shaped by Jerry's loss of self-consciousness and the subsequent momentary communion which he and the dog achieve: "during that twenty seconds or two hours that we looked into each other's faces, we made contact" (p. 34). The transformation is poignant and personal for Jerry, arousing within him a previously unfelt need for a sense of kinship with the external world. In the encounter, the two become each other. That such communion is possible is the essence of Jerry's revelation.

Yet Jerry also learns that, as a sentient being, he is subject to more than biological needs and impulses which are necessary for physical survival. The understanding—his revelation—immediately alienates him from nature by virtue of his rationality, self-reflection, and ability to define his experience. He simultaneously realizes both the separateness of personal enlightenment and the longing for companionship which such a sense of separateness engenders. Such transcendence is, then, not achieved without cost. There is the separation from those who are uninitiated and have therefore not shared the experience. There is the sense of loss of the transcendental when the initiate returns to ordinary, albeit made-over, consciousness. Thus, despite the validity and intensity of their transcendent experience, Jerry and the dog must eventually re-enter the world of time and space and face the inevitable sense of loss which accompanies all such returns. The two are no longer "one," and yet they cannot simply return to their old relationship of two set against each other. They surrender to a new "fiction" in order to define their madeover relationship: "When the dog and I see each other, we both stop where we are. We regard each other with a mixture of sadness and suspicion, and then we feign indifference. We walk past each other safely; we have an understanding. It's very sad, but you have to admit it's an understanding" (p. 35).

While Jerry clearly speaks for Albee in regard to the necessity of such fictions or understandings in the face of the "sadness and suspicion" of return to the non-transcendental, that need has long been recognized as an important after-effect of the experience of initiation. Ortega y Gasset, for instance, writes: "In the vacuum arising after he has left behind animal life, [Man] devotes himself to a series of non-biological occupations which are not imposed by nature but invented by himself. This invented life—invented as a novel or a play is invented—man calls human life, well being. It is not given to man as its fall is given to a stone or the stock of its organic acts—eating, flying, nesting—to an animal. He makes it himself, beginning by inventing it."¹²

It is this vacuum which is the source of man's creative life, and while Jerry has long been seen as Albee's symbol for the modern artist, what has not been fully understood is that the source of Jerry's creative drive is the sense of loss created by his own initiatory experience and related in his tale of himself and the dog. Art, then, is born of both vision and suffering, out of both gain and loss: "I have learned that neither kindness nor cruelty by themselves, independent of each other creates any effect beyond themselves; and I have learned that the two combined together, at the same time, are the teaching emotion. And what is gained is loss" (p. 36).

Jerry's lines suggest that, as long as those impulses are kept rigidly apart, they cannot convey the totality of human experience. This enforced separation, in turn, precludes any movement beyond these emotions to stronger expressions of love and hate. However, society, implicitly equated with the zoo within Albee's play, tends to separate human emotions and impulses into appropriate categories or "cages." In extreme cases, such as that of Peter, the result of such careful isolation of emotions is a lack of identity or completeness of self.

Conflicting emotions, such as the kindness and cruelty of which Jerry spoke, simultaneously function in the full complexity of human motives, and no complete self-understanding is possible unless individuals acknowledge their often simultaneous capacity for good and evil. While Jerry's experience with the dog has brought him a greater knowledge of the facts of his existence, it has also caused him to lose the purity of simple, clearly defined motives in an easily apprehended and described universe. It is the paradoxical complexity of that universe which often leads man to create fictions as a means of survival. In the end, all explanations become mere fictions because of the inadequacy of language in the face of such complexity. This awareness on Jerry's part accounts for his paradoxical use and condemnation of such verbal fictions as well as the extreme self-consciousness of his language.¹³

Jerry goes further in his analysis of the inadequacy of language to express the totality of experience: "And was trying to feed the dog an act of love? And, perhaps, was the dog's attempt to bite me not an act of love? If we can so misunderstand, well then, why have we invented the word love in the first place?" (p. 36). Words in The Zoo Story, as this passage indicates, are another example of a "cage" imposed upon reality. Jerry here attempts to find the category, or pigeonhole, that will help him understand and order his experience with the dog. At the same time, however, he resists all categories, which he perceives as limiting and therefore falsifying experience. Any definition, he implies, would exclude some aspect of the whole experience.

The problem of setting limits which surfaces in Jerry's consideration of the delimiting nature of language is also apparent in Jerry's constantly voiced concern with the issue of circumscription, both voluntary and involuntary, as Jerry moves from a consideration of the separation of humans from animals, to that of humans from humans, and ultimately to the individual from awareness of himself. To understand how he perceives these divisions, one must look to the numerous references he makes throughout the play to the separation between animals and humans. He went to the zoo, he says, to see about "the way people exist with animals and animals with each other and with people" (p. 39). Early in the play, he focuses on the separation of Peter's parakeets from their natural predators, the cats. When he finally begins to relate the story about the zoo, he gets as far as the lion keeper entering the lion's cage before he begins to "enter" Peter's "cage" by challenging him for the bench. Jerry's own encounter is with an animal who, at first, responds to him simply as one animal would respond to another in nature; that is, without acknowledging the "understanding" of "one's place" imposed by civilization. Jerry eventually realizes that it was this level of understanding which provided common ground between them. He attempts to rediscover this common ground with Peter as a basis for their communication.

To establish such a common ground with Peter, Jerry resorts to the threat of violence. When he begins to punch and insult Peter, Jerry moves them toward an interchangeability that reinforces their relationship as doubles whose very opposition presupposes their unity. That is, the confrontation Jerry initiates over the bench isolates and focuses the sharp yet arbitrary differences between Peter and Jerry which, when broken down by means of their mutual anger, reveal their essential sameness."¹⁴

Jerry's expressed need for Peter's bench is an incidental focus for his real need to possess Peter's being, or, in his own words, to "get through to" the other man, to "make contact" (p. 34). Jerry's choice of the bench is obvious since Peter identifies that particular object with himself. Once Peter is threatened with its loss, he articulates the identification by associating it with his adulthood, his manhood, and his sense of responsibility: "I've come here for years; I have hours of great pleasure, great satisfaction, right here. And that's important to a man. I'm a responsible person, and I'm a GROWNUP. This is my bench and you have no right to take it from me" (p. 45).

In challenging Peter's right to the bench, Jerry leads Peter away from the social structures dividing them—structures which make Peter unable to accept the original brotherhood Jerry offers—by provoking him to a level of interaction at which they can share experience, that level outside society which Jerry calls "animal." Their conflict first clearly differentiates them as antagonists and then dissolves the differences by creating for each a reflection of his own antagonism in the other. In the end, the sameness of the mutual violence comes to overshadow the differences which originally gave rise to their violent impulses. Thus, when Jerry rushes to grab Peter by the collar, Albee's stage directions indicate that their faces must almost touch (p. 46).

Within The Zoo Story, the unity and reciprocity which violence effects finds its most striking expression in the climactic tableau scene (p. 47). There, for all their initial differences, Peter and Jerry unite beyond all definitions, structures, and language—even the line between victim and victimizer becomes blurred, as it was earlier in the case of Jerry and the dog. The moment of their transcendence of these fictions is necessarily one of silence and absence of movement. In that moment, too, the act leading to Jerry's death loses its distinction as either suicide or murder. Jerry's sacrifice/death is, then, necessary: the cultural crisis culminating in the characters' violent interaction over the bench must find an outlet upon which to expend itself; otherwise their distinctions (and, by extension, the social order) cannot be restored.

The lesson inherent in Peter's initiation is, consistent with the motif of the double, just the reverse of Jerry's, since Peter has been all but subsumed by human-defined culture from which he must eventually be severed by reawakening his less reflective impulses. Jerry as much as predicts this early in the play when he tells Peter that he "looks like an animal man" (p. 18). When Peter finally "loses control," he undergoes a series of basic emotions, he becomes "tearful," "beside himself," "hysterical" with laughter, "whining," "enraged." For the first time in the play (and, one might conjecture, for the first time in his adult life), Peter's responses are immediate reactions to real feelings, uninterrupted by the lag of self-conscious deliberation.

The direct alignment of "animal" and "rational" within Peter fulfills the intention of Jerry's ritual. Ritualistic overtones continue in the chant Peter whispers as Jerry is dying. According to the stage directions, Peter repeats "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God," "many times, very rapidly" before he breaks down in tears and exits, uttering the same words in "a pitiful howl" (p. 49). The cry, echoing Jerry's scream of "an infuriated and fatally wounded animal" when he impales himself on the knife, must certainly be meant to be one of recognition. Albee's drama, unlike many of its contemporaries, is nothing if not cathartic.

There has been a tendency to interpret the ending of The Zoo Story as Albee's parody of religious feeling. On the contrary, Peter's ritual, in which he sits on a bench reading a book every Sunday "in good weather," is the playwright's example of the ritualistic impulse grown remote from its original roots and compromised by the pervasive influence of materialism. Though still alive, the impulse has, to use Jerry's terminology, "no effect beyond itself."¹⁵ Unlike the modern mentality, the pre-civilized mind, as it is reflected in original initiation ceremonies, views the frightening agents of the rite itself and the often violent symbolic death the initiate must face as regenerative, causing the novice to move from innocence to experience. The initiate is separated from a narcissistic attachment to his mother and, by means of his experience with death, becomes an adult member of his tribe. Albee's play employs a similar structure, and perhaps it is on this basis that it is often misunderstood. However, unlike primitive initiation, Albee's ritual of initiation is not an initiation into society but, instead, into autonomy, into the maturity to resist surrender to absolute systems of belief and external sources of self-definition. Peter's break with the security of the social collective is symbolized by the severance from his bench and by the confrontation he has with death. When Jerry takes out and clicks open an "ugly looking knife," the realization of his mortality and the apparently arbitrary imperatives that exist beyond rationality dawn on Peter: "You are mad! You're stark raving mad. you're going to kill me!" (p. 46). Jerry, by his death, incorporates the principle he represents back into society, an idea amplified by his contention that Peter will see Jerry's face on television—the reflector of modern America's experiences and self-images. His death also restores order, not cyclically, but with the crucial difference implied that Peter must restructure his life without his bench from which, as Jerry tells him, he has been "dispossessed" (p. 49).

The message of The Zoo Story, as of later Albee plays, is that the patterns inherited in life are of necessity untested. Yet, in reaching beyond such patterns, Jerry and Peter come to what Lawyer in Tiny Alice calls "the edge of the abyss" to face the primal fears of abandonment and loss of identity. Put another way, the characters temporarily escape all limits, dissolve all distinctions, encounter formlessness, and, if the form of their initiation holds true, strike their own bargain with reality and experience. Inherent in the structure of Albee's play is the idea that all patterns are created fictions, fictions which are necessary nonetheless, since they are the only means through which experience can be made comprehensible. Yet, because humans create their fictions, they can both control and change them. Albee holds forth the possibility, through Peter, that the disintegration of an old identity (an identity "borrowed" from identification with external authority) along with the inevitable panic such disintegration encourages may be the means for a new, more consciously formed personality. Such life-shaping structures, his play suggests, must be created rather than inherited by the individual and must continuously be reformed, so as never to be mistaken for the absolute and implacable.

Notes

¹See, for instance, Michael E. Rutenberg, Edward Albee: Playwright in Protest (New York: Avon Books, 1969), p. 29; Mary M. Nilan, "Albee's The Zoo Story: Alienated Man and the Nature of Love, Modern Drama 16 (June 1973):58-59; Rose A. Zimbardo, "Symbolism and Naturalism in Edward Albee's The Zoo Story," Twentieth Century Literature 8 (April 1962): 15; Gilbert Debusscher, Edward Albee—Tradition and Renewal, trans. Anne D. Williams (Brussels: American Studies Center 1967), p. 12; Anne Paulocci, From Tension to Tonic: The Plays of Edward Albee (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), p. 43. For critical analyses focusing on the questions the play poses rather than the solutions it offers, see Ruby Cohn, Edward Albee (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), p. 10; C. W. E. Bigsby, Albee (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1969), p. 16; Robert Bennett, "Tragic Vision in The Zoo Story" Modern Drama 20 (March, 1977):58.

²Introduction to Edward Albee, The Plays, Volume I (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1981), p. 10.

³Edward Albee, The American Dream and The Zoo Story (New York: Signet, 1963), p. 19 and p. 20. All subsequent page references appear in the text.

⁴Rutenberg, p. 30.

⁵Bennett, p. 60.

⁶For a comprehensive analysis of the double in literature see Carl F. Keppler, The Literature of the Second Self (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1972).

⁷C. G. Jung, Four Archetypes: Mother/Rebirth/Spirit/Trickster, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series, 1959, 1969), p. 55.

⁸Jerry's directorial role is Albee's subtle use of the alienation effect, meant to remind the audience that the stage frames mimetic, not real, action. Albee, in his characterization of Jerry, strikes a balance between realistic and stylized actions, an aesthetic balance that reflects the theme of balancing opposites.

⁹Anold von Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 65-115; see also

¹⁰Eliade, p. 62.

¹¹Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series, 1954), p. 61. There have been various other explanations of mythological animals. Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces writes of how the hero "comes at last to the Lord of the Underworld … [who] rushes against him, horribly bellowing; but if the shaman is sufficiently skillful he can soothe the monster back again with promises of luxurious offerings" (p. 100); Joseph Henderson in The Wisdom of the Serpent calls the mystic animals "sacred animals possessing secret wisdom the dreamer wishes to learn" and representatives of the experience of "submission to a power greater than the hero himself (p. 51). C. G. Jung refers to them as "part of the instinctive psyche" which has been lost or separated from consciousness like a "loss of soul" (Jung, p. 73).

¹²"Quoted in Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction, 1950-1970 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 29.

¹³"Tanner in City of Words calls the self-conscious use of language, "foregrounding." In his view this stylistic device permeates most of American literature. His thesis is that American writers particularly have been overwhelmingly concerned with the tension between structure of artifice and reality. Though Tanner does not refer to Albee in his book (which deals only with fiction), his contention that "American writers seem from the first to have felt how tenuous, arbitrary, and even illusory, are the verbal constructs which men call description of reality" applies equally to the playwright. We can see this tension in Jerry's frustration with the inadequacy of definition. See also ;

¹⁴This thesis of the role of violence in ritual and drama is put forth by René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).

¹⁵"Albee's play realizes many of the tenets of Antonin Artaud's "Theatre of Cruelty." Artaud's theory was that theatre would representationally confront modern humans with their most primal impulses in order to annihilate their comforting social forms and reinvolve them in their own lives.