[The following essay contends that The Zoo Story is a tragedy, not a melodrama, as many critics have charged. Bennett observes that, "in the manner of tragedy, this play tests and questions, by the experience it presents, the propositions of religion and philosophy."]

While the conclusion to The Zoo Story has met with the approval of some readers and the disapproval of others, the meaning of the protagonist's death has not been disputed. The consensus has been that Albee intends us to understand Jerry's death as a Christ-like sacrifice. Rose Zimbardo and George Wellwarth praise the symbolism. Martin Esslin and Brian Way complain that the play's ending loses absurdist rigor and degenerates into sentimentality.¹ Similarly Lee Baxandall argues that when Albee resorts to aesthetic solutions, which are symbolically instead of historically meaningful, he does not offer a solution viable in drama, "the most socially rooted of the arts."²

Apparently unheeded by all these viewpoints are Albee's stage directions. These, it seems to me, are included in order to prevent us and the actor who plays Jerry from either sentimentalizing his death scene or regarding it purely as a Christ-like sacrifice. Albee writes:

Oh, Peter, I was so afraid I'd drive you away. (He laughs as best he can) You don't know how afraid I was you'd go away and leave me.… Peter… thank you. I came unto you (He laughs, so faintly) and you have comforted me. Dear Peter.³

The biblical phrasing and the expression of thanks and affection would, by themselves, be sentimental. Laughter, however, is an expression not of compassion, but of psychic distance. Moreover, Jerry's going on to praise Peter for being an animal like the rest of us ("You're an animal, too" [p. 49]) may be laughable and depressing, but it is not melodramatic; and his scornfully mimicking Peter in his dying breath should discourage us from accusing Jerry of emotional over-indulgence. At the same time, however, Jerry clearly wants to believe that a God exists and that love is possible; and he has witnessed what seem to be similar longings in the other persons in his rooming-house. Indeed, Jerry is not a hardened absurdist;⁴ and if Albee's stage directions are followed, there will be supplication along with mimicry in his ambivalent last words. Jerry hopes that his death is possibly sacrificial and that he has created by his act an effect beyond itself; but he is not so spiritually entranced as to fail to realize that his Christ-like self-sacrifice for Peter's regeneration—what Baxandall means presumably by his "aestheticism of symbolic transcendence" (p. 98)—may possibly be no more than a glorified front to a suicide. In other words Jerry, and Albee, are as conscious of the frailty of the symbolic solution as Baxandall is.

To regard the dramatic experience of The Zoo Story as embodying a doctrinally absolute statement underestimates the play's complexity. Albee does not here presume the absurdist's certainty that all is meaningless nor the social protester's certainty that he knows what is wrong and how to correct it.⁵ Rather, in the manner of tragedy, this play tests and questions, by the experience it presents, the propositions of religion and philosophy. Through Jerry, Albee asks how we can tell whether spiritual love is a genuine human faculty or an illusion. Jerry hopes that man is a spiritual creature, expects that he is no more than an animal with illusory and frustrated spiritual longings, and fears that man may have lost even his animal instincts as a result of social conditioning. At the time of the play Jerry is consumed by a need to resolve these doubts; and, to borrow Arthur Miller's description of the tragic hero, he "is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure … his personal dignity."⁶

Jerry's concern about his personal dignity is more cosmic than social, and is centered in the question, "If we can so misunderstand, well then, why have we invented the word love in the first place?" (p. 36) Jerry realizes that if man is incapable of loving, he cannot be blamed for not loving. On this level of perception, Jerry sees Peter as man (Homo sapiens) to be understood by comparison with animal and vegetable nature. Jerry does not pigeonhole Peter as the-affluent-New-York-businessman; this label is merely the superficial and illusory identity that he sees standing in the way of Peter's self-knowledge. Whereas Michael Rutenberg sees Jerry as a social critic like Vance Packard,⁷ 1 find him less obviously but more importantly a philosopher like Hamlet. Just as Hamlet questions why the Creator has given us "godlike reason / To fust in us unus'd" (IV.iv.33-39),⁸ so Jerry wonders why man possesses the urge for spiritual communion if there is no worldly way to express and fulfill it. If love can only "fust in us unus'd," he seems to say, then man is "a beast, no more."

The dramatic power of tragedy usually depends heavily upon the playwright's giving expression to a full complex of feelings and perceptions within the protagonist toward himself and his world. These will have been generated by an experience that has jarred him from a conventional pattern of existence. In The Zoo Story the three attitudes of love, hate, and indifference provide the general frames of reference for the conflicting forces within Jerry himself and between Jerry and Peter. Kindness proceeds from spiritual nature; cruelty from animal nature; and indifference from social conditioning which reduces one's personality, Jerry suggests, to the level of a vegetable. Jerry, as author of the incident, tries to shape his actions according to the hypothesis that kindness (love) and cruelty (hate) in combination form the teaching emotion, an emotion which can harmonize the elements of spirit and body in man, and resolve the tensions that divide his amphibian nature. The seeming antithesis between the separate emotions of love and hate dissolves, Jerry has learned, when both are understood to be expressions of passionate commitment that together vie against the inclination toward apathy in the effort to define what man is or what he can become. Although one probably first thinks of the play as a conflict between the loving-hating Jerry and the indifferent Peter, I shall try to show that indifference has not been foreign to Jerry's nature, either in his past or in the present, and that the play is also importantly a conflict of all three attitudes within Jerry himself. As is true of most tragedies, there is no clear resolution in this play's conclusion. Death ends the struggle but does not definitively answer the questions, although the final projection is admittedly bleak.

In order fully to understand The Zoo Story as tragedy, we must first reassess some of the common assumptions that, if accepted, undermine the play's basic dynamics and reduce the play from a dramatic experience to a philosophical lesson. Frequently Jerry is spoken of as a symbol "meaning" something instead of a human being who is doing and feeling something. "The old pigeonhole bit" of calling Jerry a Christ figure or "a universal symbol of alienated modern man"⁹ automatically sets a critical distance between us and Jerry, and makes genuine sympathy for him impossible. We have already seen the inadequacy of a strict reading of Jerry as Christ-like. This is an image to which he consciously aspires but not one that he uncritically accepts as achieved or even as valid. The symbol, thus, remains subordinate to and less than the experience. Those who suggest that Jerry is "alienated modern man" incapable of love not only limit the play's vision but seriously misrepresent it. While their argument rightly observes that Jerry in the past has not been able to love "the little ladies" or his lonely compeers in the rooming-house, it must assume, in order to sustain its point, that Jerry, contrary to his claim, has learned nothing from his experience with the dog, and that he shows no love in his relationship with Peter. It must interpret Jerry's sharing with Peter his most personal feelings, thoughts, and experiences as insincere or as yielding to an irresistible impulse rather than, in the way Albee's stage directions urge, as an honest and difficult giving of himself. In general, studies have discussed Jerry as if his nature were frozen, not vital and developing. Jerry's comment, "every once in a while I like to talk to somebody, really talk" (p. 17), has encouraged critical inferences such as, "Jerry, weary of the indecisive encounters with the Peters …" (Baxandall, "Theater of Edward Albee," p. 88), which see his present action as part of an habitual effort to make contact. But Jerry's own account of his past indicates that what he is doing with Peter is as new to him as it is to Peter. When Jerry describes the colored queen who leaves his door open and the woman who cries behind her closed door, we realize that he observed and did not respond to their passive invitations for a relief from loneliness. Similarly Jerry never saw the prostitutes more than once. Jerry's intense assault on Peter is in striking contrast to his former aloofness. The intervening event between his past and present that causes this change is his collective encounter with the landlady and the dog. This is an experience of tragic awakening which shapes his vision of man and possesses his spirit.

Jerry differs from Peter and from us not in his complex human nature but in his particular tragic experience; and his plight sets in bold relief a universal human problem. Two experiences, his lifelong poverty and the recent rooming-house episode, separate Jerry from Peter. Jerry's poverty has made him more aware than Peter of a spiritual side to his nature that needs fulfillment. Preoccupation with the paraphernalia of society, says The Zoo Story (in a manner that reminds us of Everyman), encourages man to ignore the existential loneliness of his human condition and, hence, stifles his initiative to seek spiritual fulfillment. The traditional tragic situation in which alienation from society brings suffering and spiritual awareness is present here in the colored queen, the weeping woman, and the little ladies, as well as in Jerry. It is because these characters manifest in their actions an intense spiritual longing, a sensitivity not evident in Peter, that Jerry holds the existence of God and love possible ("with making money with your body which is an act of love … WITH GOD WHO IS A COLORED QUEEN … WHO IS A WOMAN WHO CRIES WITH DETERMINATION BEHIND HER CLOSED DOOR" [p. 35]). But whereas poverty has simply stimulated an awareness of spiritual privation, the encounter with the landlady and the dog has gone farther by jolting Jerry with the suggestion that the fault for his loneliness lies not with God, the stars, or society, but with himself. The actions of his two assailants not only force Jerry to recognize his own resistance to involvement, but also suggest to him a possible method for overcoming such resistance in others. The landlady made advances of love to Jerry, so far as her level of being could approach it, and Jerry responded with the same wish to be rid of her that Peter has toward him. The dog made advances that Jerry describes as antipathy and, on reflection, possibly love; and it received a similar resistance from Jerry. Jerry fed and poisoned the dog to get it to leave him alone. Critics impose a conventional symbolism on the dog's behavior, ignoring Jerry's unconventional perception; and they miss the point of the encounter. Rutenberg writes:

The symbolism, unmistakably, is that the dog represents that vicious aspect of society which attacks whenever Jerry tries to gain entrance. The dog never attacks when Jerry leaves the premises, only when he enters. Later in the play Peter "will respond to the invasion of his 'property' with the same ferocity the dog has shown," clearly illustrating this animalistic reaction to an invasion of one's private thoughts.

(Edward Albee, p. 31)

Perhaps the dog was protecting his domain (which is an animal trait people possess, not a feature of society which dogs have picked up), but Jerry believes and tries to explain to Peter that the dog's attempt to bite him was probably an act of love. The parallels between the dog and Peter that Rutenberg, quoting Zimbardo, draws are misleading (Edward Albee, p. 13). The dog attacks Jerry of its own initiative. Peter, left to his own initiative, would have walked home. His defense of the bench comes only after Jerry's calculated efforts to provoke at least an animal response in Peter. There is nothing in the play's final action which relates to an invasion of Peter's private thoughts, about which Jerry has ceased to concern himself since Peter's reaction to Jerry's long monologue. The parallels that do exist are between the dog's attack on Jerry and Jerry's assault on Peter, and between Jerry's attempts to keep the dog away and Peter's efforts to avoid involvement with Jerry. For Rutenberg's symbolic formula to work, Peter would have to knock Jerry off the bench the moment Jerry sits down.

Albee's point is that Jerry has worked Peter out of his social mold as a vegetable into an animal state that is at least Peter's own self. The importance to Jerry of the assaults of the landlady and the dog is that together they have had effects outside of themselves. They have aroused in Jerry strong feelings, a violent antipathy toward the landlady and a love for the dog, curiously counterbalancing the feelings they have shown him. They have possessed Jerry with an idea of communication that he must test. And apparently they have dispossessed him of the rooming-house, just as he will dispossess Peter of the bench. Quickly, as if embarrassed to admit it, Jerry tells Peter toward the end of his narrative, "I have not returned" (p. 35). Their invasion of Jerry's private space has made it impossible for him to remain spiritually isolated, aware only of his own loneliness and his own needs.

Yet, however illuminating Jerry's experience with the dog has been, it has concluded unsatisfactorily. After claiming they made contact, Jerry says in apparent contradiction, "We had made many attempts at contact, and we had failed" (p. 35). Ironically, what seems to have happened is that their actions have resulted not in a meeting of minds but in a transference of attitudes. The dog has received Jerry's message in the feeding and poisoning and now leaves him alone, and Jerry, believing now that the dog attacked him out of affection, loves the animal! Jerry has socially conditioned the dog to indifference at the same time that the dog has engendered in him a compelling desire for establishing a relationship. The change, of course, is not the one Jerry ultimately hoped for: " … I loved the dog now, and I wanted him to love me.… I don't really know why I expected the dog to understand anything, much less my motivations… I hoped that the dog would understand" (p. 34). Jerry seems to sustain his hope for a spiritual communion by concluding he expected too much of the dog, limited as it is by its animal nature. If his longing can ever be fulfilled, it must be through communion with a person.

Jerry brings from his rooming-house experience more than a pain-pleasure teaching technique. Having his own indifference toward others revealed to him, he has learned a compassionate explanation for others' indifference toward him that allows at least a part of him to feel affection and sympathy for Peter. Indifference, which gives the impression of irresponsible neglect, complacency, selfishness, and presumptuous superiority, may actually be the embarrassed response of one who wants but does not know how to share feelings with others. Jerry's description of his final relationship with the dog is suggestive of a much broader human situation: "We regard each other with a mixture of sadness and suspicion, and then we feign indifference" (p. 35, my italics). Jerry realizes that the family man Peter, who spends his free time alone on a park bench, is as lonely as he is, though suffering less because he is more lost.¹⁰ Jerry approaches Peter, then, as an enlightened brother and not, as Wellwarth (p. 323) and Nilan (p. 59) claim, as a polar opposite.

Neither hope nor despair totally governs Jerry at the opening of the play. The new and driving hope generated by the rooming-house incident counters but by no means eliminates his "great weariness," his old and ingrained fear of involvement and responsibility. Jerry's hope is evident in his passionate displays of love and hate for Peter; his indifference, in his mocking and patronizing manner. The former attitude seeks to establish a kinship while the latter longs simply for death. On the surface it looks as if death has been Jerry's primary objective; his early prophecy of what Peter would see on TV and his retrospective "could I have planned all this? … I think I did" (p. 48) encourage this assumption. It is more accurate, though, to see Jerry at the start expecting and half hoping to die but hoping more to establish a relationship on spiritual rather than physical terms. Jerry's anger and disappointment when Peter fails to respond with loving understanding to his confessional narrative are directly proportional to the degree to which his passionate hope has overweighed his detached expectation; and Albee's stage directions indicate that the conclusion of Jerry's story and the period immediately following are the moments of greatest emotional intensity in the play.

To this point I have tried to demonstrate Jerry's basic and complex humanity, and the conditions and experiences that have raised him to a special level of sensitivity and awareness. There remains, though, in claiming for Jerry a tragic status, the need to admire his encounter with Peter as a skillful and honest attempt to resolve the basic tensions within himself and, by extension, within man. For if his effort is either facile or fundamentally misguided, or if his feelings are maudlin and excessive, his state is less than tragic.

An answer to critics' complaints that Jerry does not carry on a real conversation with Peter provides us with a means for examining Jerry's effort in specific terms.¹¹ For in Peter, Albee has effectively dramatized his belief that "the sentences people make half the time bear absolutely no resemblance to what people think."¹² Peter, at his present level of sensitivity, is not able to "really talk." And Jerry knows that he cannot genuinely communicate with Peter until he has shown him that "normal conversation" is typically a rhetorical exercise designed to avoid self-expression. In order to establish real contact with Peter, therefore, Jerry himself must "go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly." His verbal assault is the pedagogical tool by which he hopes to make Peter aware of the enslaving formula of polite conversation. With this awareness, he hopes, will come a willingness from Peter to say what he feels and thus to establish a spiritual union in which conversation will become a sharing of selves. Up through the story of the dog, Jerry moves the conversation toward greater and greater directness. When, however, Peter proves himself incapable of responding openly to Jerry's narrative, Jerry removes himself from an intensely spiritual to a less demanding physical level of confrontation. By doing this, Jerry brings Peter finally to a level where he can unite feeling and words in his angry cry, "You're a bum … that's what you are" (p. 43). It is Peter's most honestly felt statement in the play, however inadequate it may be as a description of Jerry.

Jerry resorts to the rhetorical more than the denotative power of language to excite emotion and stimulate thought in Peter. The nature and effect of Jerry's rhetorical approach have been largely ignored or poorly understood. Zimbardo says that "words, when they do penetrate Peter's surface, merely cause him to throw up further barriers to contact" ("Symbolism," p. 13). It is true that Peter resists the total commitment Jerry demands of him, which implicitly is to give up all his external tokens of identity, his occupation, family, and material wealth; but it is equally true that without his verbal stripping, Jerry could never have brought Peter to the level of animal commitment that he achieves at the end. Peter's almost cordial reaction to Jerry's tickling would have been unthinkable without the prior establishment of a personal bond. Robert Wallace, arguing against Tom Driver's position that the plot is implausible because any normal person would not have put up with Jerry, says the reason Peter stays is that he has been captivated by Jerry as storyteller and is interested in finding out what happened at the zoo.¹³ While the mystery surrounding the zoo is an enticement for staying, Jerry, before the narrative of the dog, is not for the most part telling a story nor is he desperately holding out the incident at the zoo as a lure to Peter. If Albee had made the story about the zoo the only thing holding Peter, I would agree with Driver's complaint of implausibility.

It is, however, through a skillful verbal application of the teaching principle, kindness and cruelty combined, that Jerry keeps Peter listening to him. First coercing and then cajoling, insulting then flattering, Jerry keeps Peter constantly off balance emotionally while he probes into Peter's personal life. The process gradually strips away Peter's formal defenses and establishes a bond of intimacy through shared information that makes Peter even forget at points that he is talking with a complete stranger. Jerry's approach is effective theater because it is spontaneous and improvisational; Jerry takes whatever details he can grasp about Peter and, combining the pain-pleasure formula with a fine psychological reading of his pupil, he works his effect. Consider, for example, the following sequence. Jerry, after some undirected small talk, watches Peter light his pipe and comments, "Well, boy; you're not going to get lung cancer, are you?" (p. 13) Peter, although initially annoyed by the personal and physical implications of the comment, is on reflection pleased by Jerry's apparent respect for pipe smokers. The pipe is an identity symbol for Peter. But Jerry deflates the impression and strips away the status symbol immediately by suggesting the physical reality, the likeli-hood of cancer of the mouth. Yet before Peter can let his irritation and discomfort motivate him to leave, Jerry plays once again to his ego by eliciting from Peter the term prosthesis and praising him for being an educated man and, with a cynicism that escapes Peter, a reader of Time. Jerry follows essentially the same pattern in probing Peter about his family, pets, occupation, and income. As the process develops, Peter is held less by Jerry's superficial—and calculated—flattery than by the pleasure of snaring personal concerns with another, although the initial rendering of facts and feelings each time is painful.

Once Jerry has involved himself with Peter, he can and must proceed to the more difficult task of involving Peter with him. He must subject himself to the pain-pleasure experience. It is painful for Jerry to tell Peter the embarrassing and degrading personal details of his life;¹⁴ and his occasionally cavalier tone, a feigned indifference, helps him to endure the process. Equally intimidating to Jerry is his knowledge that in trusting himself to Peter's understanding he runs the risk, should Peter fail him, of facing an even deeper isolation. We see Jerry's anxiety reflected in his shift from an immobile stance while he quizzes Peter to a pacing about as he tells about his life. Jerry during this period ceases to mock Peter so insistently, and the pretended affection and calculated scorn of the earlier part of the play yield now to more genuine sympathy and at points to more genuine anger as Jerry comes to expect greater sensitivity from Peter. As Jerry frees Peter from the tyranny of a code of polite behavior, the desired likelihood that Peter will act according to his own wishes increases; whereas earlier Jerry would manipulate Peter against his wishes through a hollow rhetorical trick ("Do you mind if we talk?"), now he holds him more through an exercise of Peter's own will. Admittedly Jerry still lures Peter as if he were a child with the promise of the story about the zoo, but there is an adult directness in his challenge, "You don't have to listen. Nobody is holding you here; remember that. Keep that in your mind" (p. 29); and Jerry commences the narrative which culminates his attempts at establishing a spiritual kinship only when he can feel that Peter's continued presence is due to willing involvement and not to customary politeness.

Throughout the entire process of educating Peter, Jerry has to keep control over himself as well; and it is with an heroic effort that he prevents his own conflicting thoughts and emotions from spoiling his systematic approach. In probing Peter for the banal details of his conventional existence, Jerry is in danger of being so uninterested in the information that he will not summon enough energy to pursue his assault. Once, when Peter inquires about what he is to see on TV, Jerry glides into a revery on his anticipated death from which he is barely able to emerge and continue his probe of Peter's life. When Jerry begins to tell Peter his history, the danger shifts to his having too little distance from himself to take Peter's perception of his life sympathetically into account. Jerry becomes surprisingly angry at Peter's kindly intended gauche presumptions: "Oh, I thought you lived in the village" (p. 21), and "Well, it seems perfectly simple to me" (p. 25). Jerry's sharp retort to the latter of these remarks so alienates Peter that Jerry, frightened by Peter's anger, has quickly to apologize in order to prevent him from walking away.

Jerry's account and interpretation of his encounter with the dog climaxes his attempt to make spiritual contact with Peter, that is, to achieve a meeting of the minds, sympathy, and love. He knows that if the story succeeds in removing all the remaining barriers of ignorance and insensitivity that still separate Peter from him, he will no longer need to manipulate Peter, who will then be spiritually free, and he will also have resolved his own emotional conflicts. During his climactic personal monologue, Jerry rarely protects himself with an air of cynical indifference. Here, except in the stylizing and partially ironic scriptural phraseology with which he frames the account, Jerry entrusts to Peter a confession and a vision essentially untouched by euphemistic or distancing language. As Jerry brings his long monologue to a close, we see a playing out of the pain-pleasure principle on its most abstract, spiritual level, objectified physically in Jerry's passing from intense exhaustion to exhilaration. Albee's stage directions reveal to us the course of Jerry's feelings and involvement:

Jerry is abnormally tense now … Much faster now, and like a conspirator … Jerry sighs the next word [People] heavily… Here Jerry seems to fall into almost grotesque fatigue… then Jerry wearily finishes [and at the end of the story] Jerry moves to Peter's bench and sits down beside him.… Jerry is suddenly cheerful.

(pp. 34-36)

Jerry's sitting down, sharing the bench with Peter, is clearly a physical manifestation of a spiritual union he hopes now exists.

Jerry has excited Peter, stunned him, and moved him to tears; but by placing himself totally at Peter's mercy at the same time, Jerry has demanded more than Peter, even in his emotionally and intellectually hightened state, can provide. Peter is frightened because he has not comprehended with his whole being Jerry's metaphysics of possession. "Ownership" to Jerry means spiritual kinship, not legal or physical possession. Jerry is initially furious at Peter's refusal to admit that he understands Jerry's message, and Peter's shaken state indicates that he does in fact understand a great deal. Baxandall ("Theater of Edward Albee," p. 88) and Zimbardo ("Symbolism," p. 15) are partly right in contending that Peter lies. But if Jerry's vision of a spiritual union as the highest bliss were valid, then Peter would embrace it if he really understood it. The fact that he resists proves that he understands only what will be lost, not what will be gained. Jerry retreats to his great weariness after Peter, still in panic, cries, "I don't understand you, or your landlady, or her dog" (p. 37, my italics). That Peter would still perceive the dog as belonging to the landlady in whose physical possession it remains leaves Jerry with the feeling not only that Peter has not understood his vision ("Her dog! I thought it was my …"), but that the vision itself is probably an illusion ("No, No, you're right") and that man's conception of himself as a spiritual being is a presumption or wish without foundation in experience.

Jerry's spiritual commitment really ends here, for from this moment he ceases to aspire toward realizing a spiritual nature in Peter and seeks only to verify his earlier projection, spoken quizzically, that Peter is "an animal man" (p. 18). Jerry's tickling and hitting are simply a reduction from spiritual to physical terms of his kindness-and-cruelty mode of instruction. Free will is no longer an urgent concern to Jerry since he seeks only to prove Peter an animal; and with little emotional strain he manipulates Peter to his desired catastrophe.

When Jerry thanks Peter for comforting him, we cannot know, nor need we think that Jerry knows, to what degree each of the various impulses inside him—his suicidal weariness, his wish to be remembered, and his selfless desire to save Peter from a death-in-life existence—contributes to whatever satisfaction he finds in dying in this manner. But we do know that Jerry has chosen no easy way to die. In tragic defiance of the existential loneliness that seems to be humanity's lot, Jerry has marshalled heroic resources of courage, energy, manipulative cleverness, and sensitivity in an effort to realize an idea of kinship. The play's tragic affirmation emerges more from the powers Jerry manifests in his quest than from the result he obtains.

The play's story is bizarre, but so are most tragedies. Its mode is tragic realism, not social realism. The incident provides Albee a context for exploring the limits of human aspiration and potential for love. Jerry is an extremest in ideals, like most tragic heroes, and he does not place a modest demand upon Peter or himself; he seeks a total commitment. Realism is sufficiently present for us to identify with the characters, but it properly is a dramatic tool, not an end in itself. The Zoo Story aims to excite feelings in us, as we experience the play sympathetically, that we seldom, if ever, exercise because we are not confronted with situations of such intensity in our own lives. These feelings, moreover, accompany and gain their legitimacy from the enlightening vision of human nature worked out in experiential terms. The play is modest in scope, but it possesses a resonance and power that one finds only in tragedy.

Notes

¹Zimbardo, "Symbolism and Naturalism in Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, " Twentieth Century Literature 8 (April 1962), 15; Wellwarth, The Theater of Protest and Paradox, 2nd ed. (New York, 1971), p. 322; Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 2nd ed. (Garden City, New York, 1969), p. 267; Way, "Albee and the Absurd," in American Theatre, ed. J.R. Brown and Bernard Harris (New York, 1967), p. 204.

²"The Theater of Edward Albee," in The Modern American Theater, ed. Alvin Kernan (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1967), p. 98.

³Edward Albee, The American Dream and The Zoo Story (New York, 1959), p. 48. All page references are from this edition.

⁴Spokesmen for The Zoo Story as absurdist theater include Esslin, Theatre of the Absurd, p. 267; Charles R. Lyons, "Two Projections of the Isolation of the Human Soul: Brecht and Albee," Drama Survey 4 (Summer 1965), 121. Way sees the play as a confusion of absurdist and social protest drama ("Albee and the Absurd," p. 204). Spokesmen against the absurdist designation include Michael Rutenberg, Edward Albee: Playwright in Protest (New York, 1969), p. 11; and Thomas B. Morgan, "Angry Playwright in a Soft Spell," Life, 26 May 1967, p. 97.

⁵The majority of critics, including Rutenberg, Baxandall, and Morgan, read The Zoo Story as a social tract.

⁶From 'Tragedy and the Common Man," New York Times, 27 Feb. 1949, II, pp. 1, 3; rpt. in Death of a Salesman: Text and Criticism, ed. Gerald Weales (New York, 1967), pp. 143-47.

⁷Edward Albee, pp. 16 and 20.

⁸The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1974), p. 1172.

⁹Mary M. Nilan, "Albee's The Zoo Story: Alienated Man and the Nature of Love," Modern Drama 16 (1973), 58.

¹⁰Cf. Arthur Miller's comparison of Biff and Hap Loman, Death of a Salesman, p. 19.

¹¹Robert Wallace, "Albee's Attack on Fiction," Modern Drama 16 (1973), 53.

¹²Quoted in Melvyn Gussow, "Albee: Odd Man In on Broadway," Newsweek, 4 Feb. 1963, p. 50.

¹³Wallace, "Albee's Attack on Fiction," p. 49; Driver, "What's the Matter with Edward Albee?" in The Modern American Theater, op. cit., p. 99.

¹⁴I differ with Rutenberg's position, which seems to be widely held, that Jerry is "in [a] fervor to spill out his own lonely feelings" (Edward Albee, p. 19).