The Iceman Cometh

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The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O`Neill is a forceful drama of the human bond disillusioned and betrayed. The motifs of betrayal and disillusionment are presented in the play as the condition of human relations and human life itself. Every man goes through some painful and somewhat bloody experience of betrayals in course of life, whether in the private realm of family or in the public realm of society, and this play portrays how (s)he, as the very betrayer and hence destroyer of human relationship as well as the betrayed and destroyed, copes with the experience. It is presented as the life-death battle of the man in the God-less modern world, in which (s)he hovers between illusion and reality, between life and death, to reach beyond disillusionment and betrayal and hence to survive. In that respect, it is the question of what humanity is, I argue, that O’Neill brings home to the audience in The Iceman Cometh.

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The survival battle of the play is subtly complicated by the layers of biographical, allegorical/symbolic, and biblical implications, as found in the dramatic devices of characterization and setting of the play, and in its theatrical language itself as well. In this essay, I will shortly point out the multilayered implications of the play, and then I will show how they embody and dramatize the theme of the human bond at crisis.
First, the biographical facts regarding O’Neill’s traumatic experience in 1912 are permeated in the skeptical frame of the play. They also make it possible for the audience to view the human bond at crisis within the basic relations of a family. O’Neill’s stay at the New York slum with derelicts and misfits in that year is closely related with the basic setting of place and time and the characterization of the play. Act One starts with the following novelistic scene description: “The back room and a section of the bar of Harry Hope’s saloon on an early morning in summer, 1912” (Act I, 619). “The back room” of a bar refers to the last ditch, the cul-de-sac, into which the social outcasts are driven. And O’Neill’s attempted suicide of 1912 is the clue to understand the pervading sense of death and despair of the play. Indeed, most of the characters in The Iceman Cometh are worn-out refugees who escape from reality and resort to alcohol for illusion, and they form a family of Harry’s, the same lodgers of a house.

참고 자료

O`Neill, Eugene. The Iceman Cometh. Selected Plays of Eugene O`Neill. New York:
Random House, 1967.