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... back room is crammed with round tables and chairs placed so close together that it is a difficult squeeze to pass between them The walls and ceiling once were white, but it was a long time ago, and they are now so splotched, peeled, stained and dusty that their color can best be described at dirty. (ONeill: Plays of Our Time 7). The hotel exists as a microcosm removed from society; the cramped back room full of dirty furniture and even dirtier people, representing the grim reality of death that lies in the dark recesses of the inhabitants minds. To end up at this bar is to acknowledge your death. However all the hotels inhabitants hold on to their pipe dreams, their last great memories of reality, all making empty promises to get back on their feet. However, they still sit, waiting for the relief of death.
Their relief is that they can finally end the suffering of day-to-day existence and leave this earth. Nietzsche pushes the notion that the only world that truly exists is the physical one. There remains no great dramatic ending, no glorious redemption, there is no higher being that any of us must answer to or any grand jury that is weighing our every action, the apparent world is the only one: the true; world is mere added by a lie (Wilcox 73). These men finally meet their death-bringer when salesman Theodore Hickman, to them known as Hickey, enters the hotel. Yearly coming by for Harry Hopes birthday, always a bringer of life and vitality (and especially alcohol), Larry and the others notice a gross change in Hickey. He begins to unnervingly preach the glory of killing your pipe dreams.
Hickey convinces the drunkards to forget those great memories of reality, forget those promises to start anew, and accept the fact that they are physically and mentally paralyzed; forever stuck in the limbo of Harry Hopes hotel until their death (Bogard 54). Travis Bogard best explained it by saying: Their dreams hold at least an illusion of lifes essence: movement in purposive action. Action, to be sure, will never be taken, but the dreams reveal a basic human truth: to foster life, man must preserve a minimal dream of movement showing the dreamers that they will never take action brings the peace of death. (54) It is Hickeys lugubrious sermons that prompt the cast of characters to go out and start anew, however each one meets painful and humiliating defeat, returning to the bar dead inside, now realizing that their pipe dreams really are nothing more than dreams. It is here that Hickey becomes a messiah of Death (Bogard 53). Hickey himself becomes ready for his own death when he first realizes that he has gotten rid of his wife, and thus the pipe dream that she will eventually punish him for his binges.
Soon after, he has the revelation that he killed her out of hatred for her, not out of pity for her, in effect killing the pipe dream that he wanted to bring her peace, he wanted to bring himself peace. With all his pipe dreams gone, he turns himself in to the police, ready for his execution (Heilman 18). Harry and the rest, in a last ditch effect to regain their dreams, tells the police officers: If youd seen all the damned fool things he made us do! We only did them because (he hesitates then defiantly) Because we hoped hed come out of it if we kidded him along and humored him. (He looks around at the others) Aint that right, fellers? (They burst into a chorus of eager assent: Yes, Harry! Thats it, Harry!
Thats why! We knew he was crazy! Just to humor him! ) (ONeill: Plays of Our Time 136). Death has been a major theme circulating through The Ice Man Cometh this has already been established; but why do these men sit and wait for their expiration dates? Why do they so readily give up on life? Nietzsche himself put it best in his famous quote, God is dead.
According to Nietzsche, it is the denial of God that allows the characters in The Ice Man Cometh to accept death, and to accept peace. Quite the antithesis of what modern Judeo-Christian dogma teaches us. As mentioned earlier, with the removal of God, along go the removal of sin and the chance of breaking Gods rules. Without the existence of the all-mighty judge, one becomes totally free, knowing there remains no just dessert when they die (Wilcox 71). For a group of pimps, drunkards, adulterers and anarchists like the ones in Hopes Hotel, the knowledge that their sinful acts will go completely unpunished in the afterlife, because there is none, is of tremendous comfort (Bogard 54). Bogard also explains that the world in which these men live, has reached a point of being mechanized, anomalistic [and] spiritless a world in which God is dead.
John Wilcox elaborates when he explains Nietzsche's idea that there no longer is any God. The belief in a Judeo-Christian God is no longer legitimate and that science and intellect has become the new God because it is tangible, and not ethereal. When Hope finally brings himself to leave his hotel after twenty years, to take a walk around the block, he is greeted by his own incredible agoraphobia and tells his friends that he was nearly run over by a car, thats why he retreated back to his hotel, not because he was overcome with fear. Hopes fictitious excuse supports the idea that men can only experience happiness that is pure illusion; Hope was content living his life making empty threats to venture to the outside world; but in the outside world, the world without God, Hope is one of the many failures that populate the hotel, a man who cant even take a walk around the block. After seeking a God to which men could belong, ONeill at last come[s] to agree with Nietzsche that men live in a Godless world in the wake of Hickeys teaching, men are left as walking corpses all they can do is to wait for death. (Bogard 55). Yet with all this discussion of the existence of God and how it relates to the death of man, The Ice Man Cometh is, simply, a dismal journey depicting the inner struggle that exists within all of us.
To say that he was a melancholy, even a morbid, fellow is to put it mildly. (Nathan 386). Oneill's plays are most all tragic and heavily nihilistic, but more importantly, spiritual. As his characters manage their personal agendas, whether they preach or follow, they are all coping with a world in which they are slave to. Not one truly reaches the goal of Overman; they are all human in their actions, they all still cling to their pipe dreams. The characters experience not only defeat in the physical world, but mentally as well. He shows us man as undergoing an inner defeat.
For the defeat his protagonists suffer is spiritual; they end in spiritual frustration; a spiritual failure his heroes lose both the world and also their own souls. (Whipple 384). The Ice Man Cometh is known in the literary world as one of Oneill's premiere plays. Written and produced in 1946, the play attracted many fans, and experienced a revival in 1998. But Iceman is not his only play, not by far. Oneill's other acclaimed plays include Beyond the Horizon written in 1920.
Beyond the Horizon is yet another tragedy of Oneill's, further elaborating the idea of God is dead. The story of the Mayo brothers and their silent competition for love interest Ruth Atkins. Robert Mayo is a poetic dreamer, while his brother Andrew is a farmer through and though. When Robert steals Andrews fianc, Ruth, Andrew ends up taking the long sea voyage Robert had planned on doing for so many years.
Never has nihilism been so present than in Beyond the Horizon when we see the slow and agonizing disintegration of character that Robert and Ruth are subject too. Their marriage begins to deteriorate as well, coming to a climax when Ruth admits she always loved Andrew. When Robert falls sick again, Andrew finally returns to witness Roberts last few days of life. Robert brings up that recurring theme of relief in death when he says on his deathbed It isnt the end. Its a free beginning the start of my voyage! Ive won my trip the right of release beyond the horizon! (ONeill, Beyond the Horizon).
The Long Voyage Home, a one act play written in 1919, is The Ice Man Cometh shrunken down to a smaller scale. Taking place in a bar in London, it tells the story of some seamen who have just returned home after a long voyage, and one of the men who is exploited by the conniving, greedy owner of the bar. Although telling the whore of the bar his long emotional story about why he wishes to return home to his family, he is still taken advantage of, and is drugged, stripped of all his money, and thrown upon a infamously rotten boat, the Amindra. The soullessness of the bartenders and whore faintly resemble Nietzsche's ideas of pragmatism and irreverence for basic moral creed (ONeill: Compete Plays 1913 - 1920 520). But is all this realistic? Is Nietzsche's quest for embracing reality even practical?
Nietzsche preaches to us that we are all part of the slave morality, blindly following the laws society has taught us, and ONeill writes depressing plays about those who cannot escape the slave morality. Their encouragement to reach that state of Overman makes sense in theory, but with the acknowledgement Overman comes the complete denouncement of human culture. It is our history and our heritage that creates those morals for us, and our people. Overman really is nothing more than being an Anarchist, and Nietzsche encourages us all to find our own set of morals.
However, as history has shown, we humans dont deal too well with chaos, and if we are all creating our own personal religion, we in effect become a useless society. The real goal should not be a complete removal from society but to somehow attain a balance of playing the game and distancing ones self. Its been told to me many times in my life, that for a truly happy life, you have to balance everything out. You have to learn to sort the nonsense from the intelligent and learn when to follow and when to lead, even if no one follows you. In the end, ONeill and Nietzsche have good intentions, but they become too utterly twisted in their ideas to attain the goals they strive for.
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Research essay sample on God Is Dead Slave Morality
