The Zoo
Story is
marked as a new development of American drama in a way in which Edward Albee
blends symbolism with naturalism to realize his theme. Symbolism means the
representation of an idea, person; or thing by something else which recalls it
by some analogy or association. It thus implies an indirect suggestion of
ideas. In The zoo Story symbolism is part of the very fabric of the play
functioning within, as well as enlarging its surface meaning.
The Zoo
Story has
a greater depth of feeling and experience, and is more original in its
conception. The zoo constitutes the central symbol of the play and is an image
of human isolation and absence of contact and communication. It is an apt and
poignant symbol. The Zoo Story is
concerned with human isolation. The world
is a “zoo” with everyone separated by bars from everyone
else-----------that is, men are not only separated from each other, but from
their own basic animal nature.
The play opens upon Peter, who is
seated on a bench in the park. He is the modern version in middle-class
stereotype who blends perfectly into the brightly-packaged emptiness of the
modern landscape. The “bars” which separate Peter from his own nature and from
other people are the material goods and the prefabricated ideas with which he
surrounds himself.
While Peter is separated from the
animal in himself and others, Jerry is an animal who fights separation from the
other animals. He is determined to discover the essential nature of the human
condition. He has a strong box without a lock, picture frames without pictures,
and pornographic playing cards that remind him of the difference between love
and sexual need.
We can also represent the symbols of
Jerry and Peter as traditional Christian’s symbols. This is Jerry or Jesus, a
thirty-year-old outcast whose purpose is to establish contact “with God” who is
a colored queen, who wears a kimono and plucks his eyebrows--------.“ And there
is Peter, St. Peter, an average world-ling who is stripped by the irresistible
Jerry or his material goods and led toward a revelation of truth.
Jerry has lived for a short time in a
rooming house on the West Side. The gate
keepers of the rooming house are a foul woman and a dog. The foul woman
symbolizes the lustrous. The description of the dog immediately identifies the
dog as Cerberus, the monster, all black with flaming eyes, who guard Hell.
The dog attacks Jerry only when Jerry
tries to enter the house, but never when he comes out. The dog considers the
house his domain just as Peter, later in the play, considers the park bench
which he has appreciated his. Both Peter and the dog are willing to fight to
the death any invader of their territories.
Jerry’s failure to attain love by
giving bribe to the dog with hamburgers symbolizes that we can not buy love or
understanding nor can we establish real contact by any easy means.
From time to time Albee gives the
audience broad clues to his symbolic equivalents so that his meaning cannot be
mistaken. Jerry has taken the first step in a journey that will lead him to the
realization of what it is like to be essentially human and to be an outcast.
Finally realizing the futility of trying to reach Peter with words, realizing
too the fragility of the vision of truth that has flashed before Peter’s mind
during the tickling, Jerry dies for Peter. He dies to save Peter’s soul from
death by spiritual starvation. Peter will be forced by Jerry’s death to know
himself and to feel kinship with the outcasts for whom Jerry has prayed.
What Albee has written in The Zoo Story,
is a modern Morality play. He chooses old symbols, that carry with them a
wealth of meaning but that yet do no violence to the naturalistic surface of
his play. The theme is the centuries old one of human isolation and salvation
through sacrifice. Man in bio-natural state is alone, a prisoner of self.
Pretending that he is not alone, he
surrounds himself with things and ideas that bolster the barrier between
himself and all other creatures. The good man first takes stock of himself.
Once he has understood his condition, realized his animality and the
limitations imposed upon him by self, he is driven to prove his kinship with
all other things and creatures. In proving this kinship he is extending his
boundaries, defying self. Proving his humanity, since the kinship of all nature
can be recognized only by the animal who has within him a spark of divinity. He
finds at last, if he has been completely truthful in his search, that the only
way in which he can smash the walls of his isolation and reach his fellow
creatures is by an act of love, a sacrifice, so great that is altogether
destroys the self that imprisons him, that it kills him. Albee, in recreating
this theme, has used a pattern of symbolism that is an immensely expanded allusion to the story of Christ’s
sacrifice. But the symbolism is not outside of the story which he has to tell
is the story of modern man and his isolation and hope for salvation.
Jerry’s tragedy is not just an
individual case. He is a universal symbol of the alienated modern man.
