Tragic Vision in The Zoo Story

Tragic Vision in The Zoo Story ROBERT B. BENNETT • 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.I 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" [po 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 th 55 KUHtKl H. HtNNtll 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 ofthe frailty ofthe symbolic solution as Baxandall is. To regard the dramatic experience of The Zoo Story as embodying a dpctrinally 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 ceitainty 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, ifneed 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 ofloving, he cannot be blamed for not loving. On this level or"perception, Jerry sees Peter as man (Homo sapiens) to be understood by comparison with animal and vegetable nature . Jerry...