[In the essay below, Amacher conducts a broad survey of the construction of The Zoo Story and observes that the play "stands up well as a tragedy in the Greek manner: its plot hangs together well in terms of its cause-effect sequence of episodes or main parts, and it contains a reversal and more than one discovery."]

Classical Plot in Central Park

The Zoo Story¹ has a rather simple and easily comprehensible structure of three main parts that are climactically ordered. In the first part we are introduced to Jerry and Peter and to their differences with respect to person, background, economic status, marital status, literary taste, philosophy, desire for communication, the way they talk, and so on. The second part deals with the story of Jerry and the dog, and the third is the zoo story—what happened at the zoo.

The action of the entire drama is played against the back-ground of "foliage, trees, sky" in Central Park in New York City on a summer Sunday afternoon in the present.² There are two park benches, and Peter is seated on one of them, reading a book, his habitual activity for such afternoons. The setting is definitely pinpointed as within visibility of the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Seventy-Fourth Street, on the east side of the park (12-13), within walking distance of Peter's residence between Lexington and Third Avenue on Seventy-Fourth Street (22).

The opposition between the characters of Jerry and Peter—the distinctive effect of part one—consists at least partly in the fact that Jerry lives on the west side of the park. The two men, however, do have one thing in common: they are nearly the same age. Peter, "a man in his early forties, " suggests "a man younger"; Jerry, in his later thirties, looks older, because of his "fall from physical grace, " hinted at by the fact that his "lightly muscled body has begun to go to fat" (11). Jerry also has "a great weariness" (11), possibly because of his long walk down to Washington Square and back again, which he tells about, but possibly, too, because of the totality of his life-experience—one so different in kind from that of the favored Peter.

The contrast between the two characters, as already indicated, is revealed by the progress of the topics they discuss. The conversation actually begins with Jerry's forcing himself upon Peter's attention by announcing three times, progressively louder, that he has been to the zoo. After Jerry discovers where he is—he had lost his way during his long hike—he moves the talk along by a series of intrusive questions, or they appear so to Peter, who wants to be let alone. But Jerry persists; for, as he explains, he had felt, for at least once, a deep desire to communicate with another human being instead of mouthing such usual remarks as "give me a beer, or where's the john, or what time does the feature go on, or keep your hands to yourself, buddy…" (19). "Every once in a while," he says, "I like to talk to somebody, really talk; like to get to know somebody, know all about him" (19).

This isolation, a common element of life in large cities, Jerry feels challenged to combat—vigorously, aggressively, and, as it happens, to the death. Thus the theme of the play bears directly on a current social problem and at the same time on the deeply philosophical subjects handled by Ionesco, Beckett, and Genet—the breakdown of language, the attempt to live by illusion, the alienation of the individual from his fellow men, the terrible loneliness of every living human being.

Jerry's questions to Peter elicit such facts about the latter's life as that he thinks he can avoid cancer by smoking a pipe, that he is acquainted with the life of Freud, that he is educated, that he reads Time magazine, that he owns two television sets (an extra one for his two daughters), that he wanted a son but that his wife would have no more children, that he doesn't really want cats but that his daughters and wife have brought both cats and parakeets into his house-hold, that he has "an executive position with … a small publishing house" handling textbooks, and makes"around eighteen thousand a year" (21), that, though he prides himself on his good taste in literature, he cannot tell Jerry the difference between two such different writers as Baudelaire and J. P. Marquand (24), that he is disappointed to find out that Jerry doesn't live in Greenwich Village, and that he is reticent generally (22) and embarrassed about discussing his sex life (32).

In the course of his cross-examination of Peter, Jerry shows no reluctance whatever about revealing his own private life. The following points come out about him: he is not married, but apparently has had plenty of one-night sex experiences with women and was even, at one stage in his development, a homosexual. He resents Peter's patronizing attitude toward him; he has had an entirely different kind of education—the "school of hard knocks." He is aware of the finicky economic class distinctions that seem to mean so much to some Americans, such distinctions as the difference between the "upper-middle-middle-class" and the "lower-upper-middle class." And he is direct and honest.

He lives on the West Side under circumstances far different from Peter's, in a "laughably small room" on the top floor, between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West. He is observant of his neighbors—the Puerto Rican family that entertains a lot; the woman who cries determinedly all day; the homosexual who plucks his eyebrows "with Buddhist concentration" (26) but who keeps his hands to himself; and the fat, elderly, gin-soaked landlady of whose sweaty lust he (Jerry) is the object (33). He seems strangely affected by the fact that he has never seen and will never get to know a person who lives in a room within a few feet of his own: "And in the other front room, there's somebody living there, but I don't know who it is. I've never seen who it is. Never. Never ever" (26).

In contrast to Peter's "apartment in the East Seventies" and his "one wife, two daughters, two cats and two parakeets," and other possessions, Jerry's personal accessories include such items as can openers, a hot plate, a few clothes, a knife, a fork, "eight or nine books," a "pack of pornographic playing cards," some rocks which he has picked up on the beach, love letters, and, among other things, two empty picture frames (27). Asked about these, he explains the sordid details of his mother's adulterous tour of the Southern states, ending with her death in Alabama, and, shortly afterward, his drunken father's accidentally stepping in front of "a somewhat moving city omnibus" (28). Following this "vaudeville act" (28) had come what he calls "a terribly middle-European joke," the death of his mother's sister "on the afternoon of my high school graduation" (29). (Jerry characterizes her as having done "all things dourly: sleeping, eating, working, praying." [28-29].) Apparently she had reared him from the time he was ten and a half—after his parents' departure. Despite these "hard knocks," Jerry does not feel sorry for himself; he is tough-minded about all aspects of his personal experience.

But Jerry suffers from certain unanswered questions arising from his experience, and these questions the other two parts of the play dramatize for us. At the beginning of part two, "The Story of Jerry and the Dog," Jerry prefaces his remarks by saying: "What I am going to tell you has 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" (36). The rather profound answer to this enigmatic opening becomes clear only at the end of this story, although the audience already knows at the merely physical level that Jerry has trudged all the way down to Washington Square and back again. Too, the audience is ready for the story because Jerry, in his account of his landlady's sweaty lust and his way of putting her off—by referring to their love of the previous day, "and the day before," so that she actually "believes and relives what never happened"—also has mentioned to Peter that the landlady's companion in these encounters is a "black monster of a dog" (34). This animal forthwith becomes Jerry's antagonist in part two of the play.

Albee presents the animal vividly. The dog is old, misused, and black all over except for its bloodshot eyes and the red, open sore on its right front paw. The dog "almost always has an erection … of sorts. [And] that's red, too." But "when he bares his fangs," "there's a gray-yellow-white color" (36). From the first, the dog had unmistakably declared his intention of biting him, as Jerry explains:"I worried about the animal the very first minute I met him. Now, animals don't take to me like Saint Francis had birds hanging off him all the time. What I mean is: animals are indifferent to me … like people (He smiles slightly)… most of the time. But this dog wasn't indifferent. From the very beginning he'd snarl and then go for me, to get one of my legs" (36-37).

Thurber has a somewhat similar dog in his well-known story The Dog That Bit People, but his animal bit indiscriminately and ubiquitously. The curious thing about Albee's dog is that he apparently does not bother the other roomers—only Jerry—and only when Jerry comes in, never when he goes out. After over a week of narrow escapes and torn trousers, Jerry decides to "kill the dog with kindness" and, if that doesn't work, to "just kill him" (37).

To his great surprise, neither plan succeeds. First, when he offers the dog "six perfectly good hamburgers with not enough pork in them to make it disgusting," the dog eats them ravenously, "making sounds in his throat like a woman," then tries to eat the paper bag they came in, and finally, after a quiescent moment in which Jerry thinks the dog smiles at him, "bam" (38), it snarls and charges him again. Second, when he poisons the dog, it becomes deathly ill—so ill, in fact, that the drunken landlady sobers up and asks Jerry to pray for her "puppykins." But both "puppykins" and landlady recover: the former, its health; the latter, her thirst.

After this episode Jerry and the dog have a confrontation—Jerry now "unafraid" and the "beast" looking "better for his scrape with the nevermind" (41). They stare at each other for a long time; and, "during that twenty seconds or two hours that" they look into each other's eyes, they make contact (41). Jerry, who now refers to the dog as his friend, says: "I loved the dog now, and I wanted him to love me. I had tried to love, and I had tried to kill, and both had been unsuccessful by themselves … I hoped that the dog would understand … it's just that if you can't deal with people, you have to make a start somewhere, with animals! … with… some day, with people" (42-43).

This passage brings us close to the theme, as does the one that immediately follows it. The contact made during that moment, it seems, had been only a transient one; for now, as Jerry says, whenever they meet they both regard each other "with a mixture of sadness and suspicion, and then we feign indifference" (43; my italics). An "understanding" has been reached: the dog no longer rushes him; he no longer feeds or poisons the dog.

I have gained solitary free passage, if that much further loss can be said to be gain. 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 [my italics]. And what is gained is loss. 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. 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?

(43-44)

Following this important passage of what Aristotle would call Thought (see Poetics), Albee has indicated silence for emphasis and has also written into the stage directions that at this point Jerry moves to Peter's bench and sits down beside him for the first time in the play. At the same time the playwright makes Jerry announce, "The Story of Jerry and the Dog: the end," thus unmistakably bringing to an effective and highly dramatic close this important second part of the play.

Although the transition to part three may seem somewhat long, it is nevertheless effective in doing two rather necessary things. First, it brings Jerry and Peter into an intensity of conflict that their differences of background and character had only begun to develop in part one. Second, it provides the motive for Peter's remaining on the scene in spite of this difference in character. An intense and fierce struggle between Jerry and Peter is necessary, for it is ultimately the cause of what happens at the final climactic point of the play—the death of Jerry at Peter's hands. If one character is going to kill another at the end of the play, the author must obviously provide preparation for such an act.

Albee's procedure in handling this preparation shows remarkable skill. He begins by having Jerry ask Peter about selling the story concerning the dog to the Reader's Digest in order to "make a couple of hundred bucks for The Most Unforgettable Character I've Ever Met." This fair question is put to Peter since he knows all about how to make money in publishing, but it also points up the great difference between Jerry and Peter. For Peter, Jerry suggests, the only value of the story might be its potential as lucre; for Jerry, however, what happened between him and the dog represents possibly the most exciting and meaningful experience of his entire life—something that has nothing at all to do with money value. So, when Peter says he does not understand why a perfect stranger should spill out his private life to him in such a tale, Jerry remonstrates with a furious whisper, "That's a lie." For he knows that Peter is not only educated (at least superficially) but is also experienced and intelligent enough to understand exactly what he (Jerry) is trying to express. Whatever this is, it has to do with the common humanity between the two men, or between any two men; and since Peter refuses to acknowledge it, it must be acted out and dramatized in a way he will never forget—which is exactly what happens in part three.

Peter's refusal to "understand" and his not wanting to hear any more about Jerry, the landlady, or the dog (45) depress Jerry and solidify the superficial but extreme opposition between the characters. Jerry says at this point, "… of course you don't understand. (In a monotone, wearily) I don't live in your block; I'm not married to two parakeets, or whatever your setup is. I am a permanent transient, and my home is the sickening roominghouses on the West Side of New York City, which is the greatest city in the world. Amen" (45).

After a little desultory conversation (46), Peter looks at his watch and threatens to leave. To prevent his departure, Jerry tickles him into helplessness, into willingness to listen to the second story—what happened at the zoo. Here Peter begins the process of self-discovery, for he notes with surprise that he cannot quite explain what had happened to him, what had caused him to succumb to the almost hysterical fit of laughing. Even Jerry remarks, "Yes, mat was very funny, Peter. I wouldn't have expected it" (49).

After this five-page transition—or interruption of the action—Jerry continues as follows:

Now I'll let you in on what happened at the zoo; but first, I should tell you why I went to the zoo. I went to the zoo to find out more about the way people exist with animals, and the way animals exist with each other, and with people too. It probably wasn't a fair test, what with everyone separated by bars from everyone else, the animals for the most part from each other, and always the people from the animals. But if it's a zoo, that's the way it is. (He pokes Peter on the arm): Move over.

(49)

This speech marks the beginning not only of part three but also of a series of moves on Jerry's part to unseat Peter from his bench. At first Peter responds with friendliness and gives him more room; but, as Jerry's requests become progressively less polite and always rougher and more demanding, unreasonably demanding, until he at last wants the whole bench—"my bench," as he calls it—Peter is aroused to fighting fury. Almost in tears, he shouts, "get away from my bench!"

Jerry replies tauntingly, "Why? You have everything in the world you want; you've told me about your home, and your family, and your own little zoo. You have everything, and now you want this bench. Are these the things men fight for? Tell me, Peter, is this bench, this iron and this wood, is this your honor? Is this the thing in the world you'd fight for? Can you think of anything more absurd?" (55-56).

Peter refuses to discuss the question of honor with Jerry, who, he says, wouldn't understand it anyway. Jerry continues adding insult to injury: "This is probably the first time in your life you've had anything more trying to face than changing your cat's toilet box. Stupid! Don't you have any idea, not even the slightest, what other people need?" (56). When Peter replies that Jerry doesn't need this particular bench, Jerry shoots back, "Yes; yes, I do." Peter, "quivering" with anger, lets out that he has come there for years, has had "hours of pleasure, great satisfaction, right here… This is my bench, and you have no right to take it away from me" (56). And Jerry retorts:"Fight for it, then. Defend yourself; defend your bench." He also insults him further by calling him "a vegetable," a "slightly nearsighted one …" (57).

At this crisis the two men are ready for battle. Jerry clicks open a wicked-looking toad-stabber. The Westside jungle has at least conditioned him for this eventuality, and he rises to it "lazily, " but nonetheless confidently and fully equipped, quietly ready for combat. Peter, on the other hand, awakes to the reality of the situation with horror and melodramatically cries out, "You are mad! You're stark raving mad! you're going to kill me!" (58). Jerry tosses the knife at Peter's feet, saying "You have the knife and we'll be more evenly matched" (58).

When Peter refuses to accept this challenge, Jerry in turn grows infuriated. He rushes Peter, grabs him by the collar, and says with great intensity, "Now you pick up that knife and you fight me. You fight for your self-respect; you fight for that god-damned bench" (58). But, when Peter only struggles to escape, Jerry begins slapping him in the face. He slaps him each time he says fight during the following speech: "… fight, you miserable bastard; fight for that bench; fight for your parakeets; fight for your cats, fight for your two daughters; fight for your wife; fight for your man-hood, you pathetic little vegetable" (59). Finally, he spits in Peter's face and insults him still again by saying, "You couldn't even get your wife with a male child" (59).

All this is at last too much for Peter. He picks up the knife and backs off a little, breathing heavily. He holds the knife far out in front of him rigidly, frozen into defensiveness; then Jerry, realizing they have reached a point of no return, sighs heavily and with a "So be it!" "charges Peter and impales himself on the knife" (59).

From this point to the end of the play, Jerry dies. But, before the last breath of life has escaped him, he clarifies the theme of the play in two fairly long speeches. In the second, the less important, he congratulates Peter on the defense of his honor, although at the loss of his bench; for Peter, he says, will never return to it because of what has happened. He also says Peter is not really a vegetable but an animal. In the first, or more important of the two speeches, he thanks Peter. (Peter is aghast at this gratitude, for he knows he has been the means of Jerry's death—the agent and unwitting executioner, despite Jerry's suicidal act.) "Oh, Peter," he says, "I was so afraid I'd drive you away … You don't know how afraid I was you'd go away and leave me" (60). Then he goes on to say,

And now I'll tell you what happened at the zoo. I think … I think this is what happened at the zoo… I think, 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 things that I would tell you would … Well, here we are. You see? Here we are.… And now I've told you what you wanted to know, haven't I? And now you know all about what happened at the zoo. And now you know what you'll see in your TV, and the face I told you about… you remember … the face I told you about… my face, the face you see right now.

(60-61; first italics are mine)³

What happened at the zoo, according to Jerry, had simply been the decision to walk in a northward direction and to try to find some person with whom he could make contact. For he had not really made contact with the dog (in the second part of the play), it will be recalled, although they had come to "an understanding" (43). Jerry expresses this situation this way: "We neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each other" (44). Yet Jerry says that, from his experience with the dog, he had learned "the teaching emotion," that combination of kindness and cruelty that formulates, for him at least, life itself (44).

This same formula, this "teaching emotion," plays itself out in the grim ending. When Jerry pierces the defensive armor of Peter, he makes contact with him in a way he never had with the dog.⁴ And he takes comfort in his success, even though it is achieved at the expense of his life—with cruelty, fated, as it were, in the chain of events. For he says: "I came unto you (He laughs, so faintly) and you have comforted me. Dear Peter" (61). And he asks: "…could I have planned all this? No … no, I couldn't have. But I think I did" (60).

Problems and Comments

There are three separate problems in this episode, as I see it, that Albee thrusts deliberately into the attention of the reader or the playgoer. First, there is the problem of the biblical language and what he means to convey by his use of it; second, there is the face on the television screen, alluded to earlier (16, 19); third, certain implications concerning human existence, either particularized or generalized. For it seems to me that Albee is working partly, but only partly, from an Existentialist position.

Earlier in the story of his encounter with the Dog, Jerry had also paraphrased the Bible, with irony, saying, "and it came to pass that the beast was deathly ill," just after he had fed it the poisoned hamburgers.⁵ Two sentences after this quotation he tells of his landlady's maudlin announcement that "God had struck her puppy-dog a surely fatal blow" and her request that he "pray" for its recovery (44).

Thus the audience is prepared for the kind of diction we discover at the end of the play.

But what does Albee intend? Or perhaps, more accurately, what do the words suggest? In the New Testament, Peter betrays Christ instead of comforting him.⁶ In the play, Peter's comfort of Jerry amounts to his not leaving him. But Jerry's faint laughter (61), as he states his gratitude, shows his insight; for he knows that such comfort as he has managed to draw out of Peter has not been freely given; it has been supplied not only with indifference and reluctance but perhaps also with latent cruelty (the other part of the "teaching emotion")—the cold steel of the knife that had brought him death. Therefore, the passage can only be construed as ironical, as in the earlier biblical paraphrase.

As for the face on the television screen, Jerry's mention of it early in the play, when he first encounters Peter (16), seems at first glance to be part of his tough-minded attitude toward himself. It is as if he were arguing, against his better judgment, the importance of his private visit to the zoo by placing it in the same category with more public and possibly more newsworthy events—such as appear daily in metropolitan newspapers and on nation-wide television broadcasts. Such an argument shows Jerry's strong individualism and makes him an appealing character, particularly as it is voiced in rebellion against the strong pressures that beset struggling individualists of all kinds in big cities like New York. Albee emphasizes the point by making Peter ask, shortly afterward (19), "What were you saying about the zoo … that I'd read about it, or see …" Jerry, however, puts him off by saying he will tell him about it soon. At this point in the play, all Jerry wants is conversation—a listener at any price.

At the end of the play, however, where Jerry says, "And now you know what you'll see in your TV, and the face I told you about… my face …" the earlier prophecy, or preparation, has been fulfilled. Murder, suicide, and accidental death belong to the category of the sensational that makes up so large a part of newspaper and television news; Jerry's death (what Aristotle and the Greeks called "tragic incident" in a tragedy) combines all three—murder, suicide, and accident. How, then, can we explain Jerry's elaborate precautions to see that Peter will not be detected as participant in this event? (He wipes Peter's fingerprints off the knife, reminds him to take his book along with him, and urges him to hurry away. [62]) The answer must surely lie in what Jerry knows about Peter: the kind of person he has discovered him to be. Whatever else he is, Peter is bookish; introspective; and, above all, highly conformist—in short, the kind of person who can never forget this incident, or Jerry. The face, then, that he will see on the television screen will be one that he projects there himself, the face of Jerry, one that will forever come between him and the other sensational events that we so often see on this medium.

Finally, the play exhibits certain characteristics of Existentialism. It impresses us, especially that part of it dealing with Jerry's life, as a struggle for existence—-in the jungle of the city. The conflict of values, the attack on the bourgeois code that Jerry continues as long as there is breath in him, is acted out on a park bench and is surely one of the basic situations of human existence that Sartre talks of as constituting dramatizable material.⁷ Moreover, Jerry qualifies as an Existentialist hero: he makes his choices freely. His decision to impale himself on the knife Peter is stiffly holding is a deliberate act. "So be it," he says simply; but he nonetheless knows full well exactly what he is doing.⁸

Jerry also represents what another writer refers to as "the strange, inaccessible self [that] … remains when a person has lost the whole world but not himself, the very real inner impassioned feel of self, the self beyond the transcendental unity" of Kant which is"unknowable and incommunicable."⁹ His death is a deliberate act of protest against the wrongs of the city, the injustice of the system, the bourgeois values that cause nausea, the feeling of life being lived in a void, the isolation of man. The play suggests that the price of sur vival under these conditions may be the murder of our fellow man, even when accomplished accidentally or unwittingly. We have heard this cliché of men's expendability bandied about by militarists in connection with the rationalizing of dropping atomic bombs to end war, but not much with respect to the cannibalism of our socioeconomic system. As Albee presents this human condition, it becomes completely absurd; and he makes this point strongly when at the end he lets Jerry taunt Peter, the survivor, with this little grotesquerie: "Hurry away, your parakeets are making the dinner… the cats … are setting the table …" (62).

That man's condition is not only absurd but also subhuman is perhaps what, in the last analysis, Albee means by the title, The Zoo Story. Yet for Jerry, who knows life closely and well, all men are divided into two classes—vegetable and animal; the former comprise those who merely subsist and the latter those who are willing to fight and kill, as animals do, for survival. At first he is unwilling to grant Peter the high praise of admission to the animal class, but ultimately, when dying, he does: "And Peter, I'll tell you something now; you're not really a vegetable … you're an animal." But it is significant that no terms—other than vegetable and animal—are used to describe the condition of man.

Jerry is in the midst of a rebellion against this condition, and wants desperately to "make a start somewhere," with animals if not with people; with anything, as he says eloquently in his account of his earlier experience with the dog; or even with a "god who is a colored queen who wears a kimono and plucks his eyebrows, who is a woman who cries with determination behind her closed door … with God who, I'm told, turned his back on the whole thing some time ago … in this humiliating excuse for a jail…"(42-43).

Let us remember here that the Existentialist view of life as a trap is really not so very different from the older Puritan concept of the world as a vale of tears with a possibly more restricted liberty of choice, or freedom of the will, than the Existentialists offer us. If, then, we reject the view of God presented in The Zoo Story, one to which Jerry is driven in desperation, we should not necessarily conclude that Albee speaks from an atheist, rather than a theist, position. For the stage directions that Albee has written for the last speech of the play, "Oh … my … God"—in which, with full consistency of character, Jerry continues his derision of Peter right to the end—call for the delivery of these words in a "combination of scornful mimicry and supplication " (62).

We also must always remember that, simply because Albee treats Jerry this way in a work of fiction, we cannot really make any very valid conclusions about Albee's own personal religious convictions, which may be entirely different from those of any character in his play. In summary, we must conclude either that the character of Jerry is slightly inconsistent here, because of his earlier representations of an ineffectual or indifferent deity (42-43), or that the peculiar brand of Existentialism offered is nearer to orthdoxy or to the theism of Marcel than to the atheism of Sartre or Camus.¹⁰ It does not necessarily follow, of course, that because Jerry feels that God is indifferent to human suffering, he is bound to assume that God does not exist. However Albee might defend the consistency of his characterization of Jerry by arguing the indifference or the nonexistence of God and the influence of either on Jerry's final statement, the fact remains that the tragic effect is heightened by Albee's inclusion of the word supplication, difficult as it is for any actor to express the complex tonal combination of simultaneous mimicry and prayer for which the author calls (62).

Tragedy in the Greek Manner

The Zoo Story stands up well as a tragedy in the Greek manner: its plot hangs together well in terms of its cause-effect sequence of episodes or main parts, and it contains a reversal and more than one discovery. If, in considering the reversal, we conceive the plot in terms of Jerry's struggle for existence against forces that threaten his highly individualistic, nonconformist character, as well as his protest against the consequent isolation that a conformist society punishes him with for daring to assert such individualism, then his confrontation with Peter, a representative of that society, becomes a kind of crisis or a climax to his entire life. And when Jerry discovers that he can pierce the barrier of this ever increasing isolation—and at the same time maintain his integrity—only at the cost of his life, and when he consequently rushes on the knife held by Peter, the plot reverses itself.

Until this moment in the plot there has never been any doubt about the ability of Jerry (the nonconformist, the poisoner of the dog, the confident battler willing to even the odds by letting Peter have the knife) to survive. On the contrary, he has always given the impression of being able to take care of himself. He has been bothered, deeply bothered, to be sure, by certain problems—his landlady's repulsive love-making, his unhappy neighbors, his episode with the mean dog, his sense of growing alienation—but there has never been any real doubt about survival as such. He has always been able to outrun the dog, to keep homosexuals at bay.

But now there is real doubt; his former good fortune turns to bad fortune. Peter picks up the knife, goaded by Jerry's insults. When Peter takes his stand, no alternative exists for Jerry. Given this situation—the aroused emotions of the combatants, the depth of their conflict, Jerry's past—there is absolutely no other way for him to make contact with the conditioned, calloused Peter (who, I repeat, represents the coldly adamantine exterior which society turns on the nonconformist) than by lunging at the knife. Jerry consequently triumphs over Peter and shows the superiority of his code and his character. He becomes in his death a kind of hero, and the playgoer experiences a genuine catharsis of pity and fear.¹¹

Turning now to discovery or recognition, we immediately observe that we have a double one.¹² We have already considered Jerry's discovery or recognition that there is no other course open for him except suicide. We have seen how Peter becomes, at least momentarily for him, an enemy. And this change from friendliness to hate on Jerry's part is what Aristotle means by recognition—"a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune."¹³ For Peter, too, there is a recognition, beginning at the point where he thinks Jerry is going to kill him (58). But by a skillful twist Albee surprises the audience (and this is the proper effect the reversal of the plot should have, as long as it follows the law of probability) and makes Peter actually kill Jerry. With the realization of what he has done, Peter changes from his earlier tolerance for Jerry to horror of what Jerry has made him—a murderer. Horror is perhaps not the same as Aristotle's "hate," but Albee does speak of love and hate together as the teaching emotion; and such a mixture of love and hate is the emotional state of both protagonist and antagonist as the drama closes. At first, Peter weeps, repeating again and again "Oh my God, oh my God." Then, at Jerry's injunction, he begins to "stagger away, " and the last we hear from him is a pitiful offstage howl, "oh my god!" (61-62). Thus the absurdity of survival in the twentieth century is dramatized with peculiarly Grecian effectiveness.

Notes

¹Used by permission of Coward-McCann, Inc., from The Zoo Story, The Death of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox: Three Plays by Edward Albee; © 1960.

²Edward Albee, The Zoo Story, The Death of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox: Three Plays, Introduced by the Author (New York, 1960), p. 11. Numbers in parentheses throughout this and the next two chapters refer to this volume.

³The fact that Jerry here corrects himself with Peter's language seems to show his recognition of the fact that communication has been achieved.

⁴Jerry had actually made contact, briefly, with the dog earlier. See p. 41, where he says "during that twenty seconds … we made contact." But this rapprochement had lapsed into indifference, in which they neither loved nor hurt each other, nor—what seems worse—any longer tried "to reach each other" (44).

I am indebted personally to Martin Esslin for permission to quote the following interesting note from his Reflections: Essays on Modern Theatre (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), p. 70: In Brecht's short story Brief iiber eine Dogge [Letter about a Bulldog, 1925] "a young man totally alone in the world who lives in San Francisco … desperately tries to make friends with a bulldog belonging to a family inhabiting the same tenement. Bur the dog develops a deep aversion to the narrator, and when, during the great San Francisco earthquake, the narrator finds the dog half buried under debris and wants to rescue it, the animal snarls at him, preferring to die rather than to be touched by the narrator." As Esslin points out, "Brecht has here totally anticipated the situation between Jerry and the dog in Albee's The Zoo Story."

⁵I say with irony advisedly, because in the Bible the phrase "And it came to pass" usually refers to actions outside human control, whereas here Jerry controls, or rather instigates, the situation, however underhandedly he goes about it.

⁶See Luke 22:54-62. It would be silly, of course, to identify Jerry with Jesus Christ; for, although both come unto Peter, Jerry seems to sense the vast difference between himself and Christ. And this may be the reason he laughs at his own words. For the view that Jerry represents Christ and Peter, St. Peter, see Rose A. Zimbardo, "Symbolism and Naturalism in Edward Albee's 'The Zoo Story'," Twentieth Century Literature 8 (April 1962): 14. For an even more fantastic interpretation, equating Jerry with the Ancient Mariner in Coleridge's poem (Peter becomes the wedding guest and the dog, the albatross), see Peter Spielberg, "The Albatross in Albee's Zoo," College English 27, no. 7 (April 1966):562-65.

⁷See Sartre's "Forgers of the Myth," tr. Rosamond Gilder in Theater Arts Anthology. Reproduced in R. W. Corrigan's The Modern Theater (New York: Macmillan, 1964), p. 782.

⁸Although the language may seem a little strange here, Albee prepares us with one earlier "So be it" in the mouth of Jerry (24).

⁹Marjorie Grene, Dreadful Freedom, A Critique of Existentialism (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1948), p. 24.

¹⁰See Gabriel Marcel, The Philosophy of Existentialism, 5th paperbound edition (New York: Citadel Press, 1965), pp. 9-46.

¹¹See Aristotle's Poetics, 13:2, for definitions of pity and fear.

¹²See Gerald F. Else, Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1963), pp. 342-55, for an extended discussion of recognition, either with or without reversal.

¹³Butcher translation, Poetics, 11:2.