[The following essay was originally published in Perspectives on O'Neill: New Essays, ed. Shyamal Bagchee, English Literary Studies 43 (Victoria, Canada: Univ. of Victoria Press, 1988) 17-32. It is republished with the permission of the Press and the blessings of Prof. Bagchee. The version below has a new foreword and has been newly edited and revised.]

Foreword

The Iceman Cometh, which sometimes seems to me the greatest of O'Neill's late plays, has usually been understood, by directors and producers as well as by readers and critics, as a vast mixture of realism, comedy, and tragedy. The bums who inhabit Harry Hope's no-hope saloon themselves are often sad, and sometimes pathetic, but their routines, their tales of former glory, their hopes that prosperity will be restored tomorrow are amusing; and their cynical, well-practiced routines of jokes with an interplay of pipe-dreams is often sad and funny at the same time—as high comedy often is. Their interplay creates a context for the two great stories around which the play develops, Hickey's story of a salesman's life and marriage, which he both tells to everyone and conceals, and Don Parritt's story of an adolescent boy betraying his mother, a story told mostly in whines and whispers to Larry Slade. In this paper I consider both stories, but focus more on Parritt and Larry, a story which has been largely neglected in commentary on the play.

The "hero" or "anti-hero" of Iceman is usually said to be the salesman Hickey, and the "star" of the show is usually whoever plays Hickey. (In fact the play calls for an all-star cast of character actors, all of whom must be as fine as those who play the three larger roles.) Indeed Hickey is a role that gives great range for a bravura performance as many fine actors—Jason Robards, Al Pacino, Kevin Spacey, Brian Dennehy, and others—have shown. Yet it has always seemed to me that Don Parritt is as great a role, although I have only once seen an actor fully realize the part. That was in the 1973 John Frankenheimer film and the actor was a young Jeff Bridges. If Hickey's is a tragic story, it is tragic in the sense of the word that we intend when we call Willy Loman a "tragic hero." Hickey's world is "realistic": that is, reality for Hickey is more or less the same as reality for the audience when it steps outside the theatre. Parritt's story exists in a completely different, parallel world; his story is more a fable than a newspaper item, and harkens back to one Orestes, son of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, who is driven by the gods and the Greek sense of honor to kill his mother to avenge the murder of his father. We don't know whether Parritt ever heard of Orestes or had the least idea of the ancient Greek sense of duty, but whatever in the Greek tragic ethos remains vital in our world, Parritt seems to sense it, and we know that his creator knew it intimately, and had known it most of his life. When Parritt tells Larry that he has been reading American history and has become interested in the founding fathers, it may or may not sound convincing, but it indicates a connection between Parritt and his creator. O'Neill had been reading widely in American history for at least several years at the time he wrote Iceman; he read it in connection with his huge projected "cycle" of plays about America's economic and psychological development. O'Neill also tells, through Parritt's story, a version of the story of his own youthful suicide attempt in 1912 at a waterfront saloon which was one of the models for Harry Hope's bar, at the time of his divorce from his first wife.

My original intent when I wrote the paper was to correct what seemed to me an imbalance in commentary on the play in which Parritt and his story were dismissed or ignored. Robert C. Lee, for example, in "Evangelism and Anarchy in The Iceman Cometh," dismissed him as "A moral leper," "the lowest figure on the moral scale," while John Henry Raleigh called Parritt "the most repugnant character ever created by O'Neill" (184). Even as perceptive a reader as Michael Manheim once wrote that he found Parritt "endowed with little personality" and described the relationship between Parritt and Larry marked by "an unreal quality" (138). Judith Barlow gives what seems to me a more balanced view of Parritt and finds Larry "the only tragic character in the play" (62). She comes somewhat closer to the view of Parritt I develop. Two other writers address the difference between the ways Hickey and Parritt think about death: Susan Letzler Cole mentions the play's resemblance to Greek funereal rites and describes Larry's reaction to Parritt's death as an "Aristotelian catharsis" (165); see also Winnifred Frazer in Love and Death in The Iceman Cometh. Daniel Larner has written wisely and insightfully about the "Greekness" of The Iceman Cometh. I will save further thoughts on the "Greekness" of the play for a book in progress.

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In The Iceman Cometh, O'Neill composes a huge and vastly complex dramatic poem. So large is the playwright's vision that it suffuses The Iceman with several distinct sensibilities or "planes"—to borrow a metaphor from H. A. Mason's valuable book The Tragic Plane. These planes include the realistic, the poetic, and the comic as well as the tragic. At any moment in the play, O'Neill requires us to think and otherwise respond to any or all of these qualities and perspectives. To begin in broad terms, the general plane of the fellowship of Harry Hope's regulars is often comic, however desperate the individuals' circumstances may be. The story of Hickey and his wife Evelyn is mostly presented "realistically" (though not always truthfully) by Hickey himself. (I use "reality" or "realism" or "realistic" to mean the way we perceive the difference between real and not real in everyday life, the way an audience tells the difference between what is real and what is not real in the world or ordinary life when it leaves the theatre.) In general, O'Neill presents Hickey, Larry Slade and Don Parritt realistically. The story of Don Parritt, his crime and his punishment, as perceived by Larry and the audience, is ultimately tragic and as much a fable as a realistic story.

The play's tragic aspects are the principal topic of this essay. O'Neill shows the development of Don Parritt's insight into his crime. Borrowing an ancient word used to describe an event in a Greek tragedy, I claim that the play achieves a moment of "anagnorisis," a large recognition or discovery or insight about the characters in the play, about ones's self or about another, or about the world. The discovery permits Parritt to seek and accept a fit punishment for his crime, a tragic anagnorisis that leads and permits the youth to seek and accept a fit punishment and exorcism. I ask the reader to bear with me in the use of old literary or dramatic terms, the meanings of which are not necessarily agreed upon by all who use them. I will try to make my own meaning as clear as I can. One good reason for using the terms is to indicate ways that O'Neill had vital connections to the writers, ancient and modern, who were not only his predecessors but also his mentors.

O'Neill shows Parritt forcing Larry to reach an anagnorisis about himself as well as about Parritt, a recognition brought about by having to watch, participate in and understand what Parritt learns. Anagnorisis brings Larry, at the end, to the thing he has spent his life resisting and denying, to feel life's infinite sadness and know that his intellectual searching has blinded him to fundamental facts that he thought he knew better than most: that existence implies mortality; and that human understanding, whatever else it may do, requires us to know our own mortality, to anticipate our own death.

The bums, the "regulars" in Harry Hope's bar, are dead and refuse to know it. Somewhere along the way, when a loss gave them an inkling that they had begun to die the moment they were born, they shut their eyes in dread. They put their mouths around a bottle, wrapped themselves in the friendly darkness of the no-hope saloon, and settled in for the slow death by booze. From dread of death they became walking corpses, "a lot of stiffs cheating the undertaker" as Hickey says (689). Because they so fear death that they cannot acknowledge its reality, the bums cannot tolerate enough pain to endure ordinary life except in a state of anesthesia.

Hickey has refused to be afraid. If he senses that something in his nature drives him toward death, and has made him want for a long time to end his own life (690), if it is a condition of mortality that something innate drives us all toward death, that doesn't mean nothing can be done. For Hickey there is always something to do, no matter how bored and restless he is made by the thing within. No matter how small the town he finds himself in, whether the Hoosier town in which he grew up or the one he happens to find himself in while trying to sell his line, he can always find something to do if he keeps moving. If being alone makes him start seeing things in the wallpaper of hotel rooms, he can do something about it. It can't be booze. He can't drink on the job because success as a salesman provides his only independent source of self-esteem. Pride in sales-craft helps him keep at bay a gradual death by alcohol.

By a leap of faith he will defy nature. With a salesman-preacher for a father, it can't be religious faith. It has to be dames. Any old tart will do in a pinch, or a bored housewife who can be convinced she needs something besides the kitchen gadget he is peddling. But for the long run it has to be love, his love of Evelyn and hers for him, to silence knowledge of death's sting. Prostitutes accept Hickey's nature, Evelyn forgives it. Evelyn's faith in her faithless husband temporarily heals the wound nature has made in his nature. A solution as old as the medieval troubadours, it works for Hickey for a long time. Then it works no longer, and the primacy of death asserts itself. As soon as Hickey enters Harry Hope's bar, Larry smells the iceman of death upon him.

As sensitive to death as Hickey, Larry once found a faith that combined love of a woman with a utopian ideology, and, like Hickey's leap of faith in Evelyn, Larry's faith in the Movement has worked for a while. But the woman's faith has rested less in a lover than in ideology. When love has soured Larry lost the Movement too. Misanthropy confirmed, he turns away from people to booze and pessimistic philosophy as homeopathic cures for dread of death. Like may heal like, he hopes. He thinks to avoid feeling. Above all, Larry is a rationalist.

At the beginning of The Iceman, Larry is the character to whom the audience is first attracted and with whom it first identifies: the rational man, one on whom to rely as a guide through an evening in the asylum. But rationalism brings Larry as much discomfort as it brings him comfort, for it causes him to hate and exclude from his life the large number of things in life that seem irrational or that resist reason. Confronted with the irrational, say Parritt's betrayal of his mother, Larry can only strike out at it with disapproving judgments: "I don't give a damn what you did" he tells the boy in act 2. "I don't want to know—and I won't know!" (636); ". . . If you won't keep still you'll be saying something soon that will make you vomit your own soul like a drink of nickel rotgut that won't stay down!" (act 3, 666). "Stop shoving your rotten soul in my lap!" (act 4, 691). Larry uses disapproval to avoid or postpone the pain that understanding the boy's suffering will eventually cause him. But Larry cannot conceal from himself the knowledge that eventually he will have to understand and deal with Parritt's dilemma, even though understanding will strain his resources to their limits.

Philsophical detachment works pretty well for Larry so long as nothing makes him feel for, as well as think about, the mortal condition; and if something does, booze helps him over the hard time. Parritt asks Larry to feel, not think; that is why the old man so fears the youth. Parritt attacks the foundation upon which Larry has built his grandstand. The understanding Parritt needs cannot come through Schopenhauer or Heine, any more than through drinks or sex with tarts. He needs empathy, not philosophical answers.

Parritt is an Orestes for a godless time, a Hamlet without much wit or eloquence. He has been maddened by maternal Furies evoked by his crime and made alien to all his fellow humans. He is as isolated as any character O'Neill ever created. He asks Larry not for forgiveness but for the gift of fellow feeling, the gift that will allow him to die a person, guilty of a human crime, and not an alien. Of such matters Larry wants to know and feel nothing. The old man wants to live out his life without dreading its end. To avert dread he lets himself feel nothing stronger than the self-satisfaction that accompanies ironic wit. Parritt must make Larry remember the life they once shared and the love they both felt for Parritt's mother.

Larry begins resisting the appeal to empathy as soon as he sees Parritt, and nearly everything he says at their first meeting pushes the youth away. First he cadges for drinks, the only time in the play he does so. He talks of longing for death and hating life; he speaks fondly of the No Chance Saloon, and assures himself as well as Parritt that it's as harmless as a graveyard; he denies having any pipe dreams left since being disillusioned by the Movement.

Parritt will not be put off. The youth has spent a lifetime resisting inattention and refuting intellectual evasions. The conditions of his life have taught him to tolerate shame and guilt. He recalls all too vividly the loneliness of his childhood and the jokes and stories Larry had once told him. The warmth of the memory embarrasses him, and so do the present feelings of gratitude and affection toward the old anarchist. Even embarrassment doesn't prevent him from securing from Larry a moment of shared warmth (in act 1):

PARRITT: . . . I guess I got to feel in the years you lived with us that you'd taken the place of my Old Man. (Embarrassedly) But hell, that sounds like a lot of mush. I suppose you don't remember a damned thing about it.

Larry must have seen something in the boy years before that reminded him of his own alienated self. It is the first time in the play he speaks from his feelings.

LARRY: (Moved in spite of himself) I remember well. You were a serious lonely little shaver. (Then, resenting being moved, changes the subject) How is it they didn't pick you up when they got your mother and the rest? (578-79)

Evasion begets evasion. Alone again after a moment of mutuality, Parritt retreats to the grim business of trying to discover why he committed his crime.

Confronted with Larry's anger or indifference Parritt could not tell the truth even if he knew it and had a way to express it. He intuitively knows he must make Larry curious about him; the old man ignores most other desires but he still wants to know things. If Larry becomes curious, he will participate in discovering the nature of the youth's crime. Were Parritt to say directly: I am the stool pigeon, I sold out my mother and the others, he would get from Larry only contempt and loathing, feelings he already inflicts upon himself in such great measure that they prevent him understanding what he did. To understand he must make Larry empathize. With Larry's empathy, the judgment they both share of the crime and of Parritt's character will not matter. If Larry understands, as he understood that the child was serious and lonely, Parritt will be less isolated in his guilt, and his crime will seem at least human and comprehensible, no matter how despicable.

Parritt forces Larry to remember Rosa. She kept his letters; she would have done that with no one but Larry. Did Larry leave the Movement because of Rosa? Do you remember the quarrel when you broke up? I remember, even if you say you don't. Larry is at his most philosophical, most voluble, in evasion: breed of swine called men, the Cause, see all sides of a question, Walpole, can't build a marble temple out of mud and manure. Parritt smiles mockingly and persists. "I'll bet Mother has always thought it was on her account. You know her Larry. To hear her go on sometimes, you'd think she was the Movement" (580-81). The metaphor touches something in Larry that makes the old man feel puzzled and repelled, and he rebukes the youth. "That's a hell of a way for you to talk about what happened to her!"

With Larry's attention focused, Parritt can suddenly see himself, and he is overcome by confusion and guilt. "I keep forgetting she's in jail. It doesn't seem real. I can't believe it about her. She's always been so free. I—But I don't want to think of it." The youth's confusion moves Larry to "a puzzled pity in spite of himself." From time to time, for a few moments at a time, each responds to appropriate feeling in the other, before the compulsion to morally censure leads Parritt to lie or Larry to push the boy away. Larry insists he has no answers, nothing to give Parritt, save Heine's advice: to sleep, to die, to avoid being born.

In response, Parritt begins to tell half-truths about his fight with his mother. She didn't want him going around with tarts. But she had always acted the free woman. That made her mad and she accused him of losing faith in the Movement. Had he? Of course: "The same as you did, Larry." And someone selling them out. "It knocks you cold. You don't know what the hell is what!" Although Parritt knows who sold them out, he doesn't know why or even how, so the truth underlying the evasion rings through. At the core of each of Parritt's lies there is a grain of truth, and he reluctantly allows the grains to accumulate even as he continues to lie. Although Parritt cannot let himself remember it clearly in the light of later knowledge, the tart's attention must have gratified him greatly when he believed they had fallen for each other, for he was starved for any sign of approval from a woman. Parritt's confusion is genuine. Its authenticity moves Larry to "sympathy and pity in spite of himself." But now Hugo erupts "Gottammed stool pigeon." Parritt stammers, then threatens to hit Hugo, then babbles in defense of the old anarchist. Larry sees more than he wants to see in the incident and draws around him his cloak of irony as he turns his wit to introduce the derelicts. The incident with Hugo and the later encounter with Willie silence Parritt for a long time, but Larry is attentive, much later in act 1, when Parritt lamely and compulsively explains why he hates "every bitch that ever lived" (604). Parritt retaliates against Larry for his searching look by mocking the old man's seat in the grandstand. In spite of himself, Larry cannot remain detached; he cannot resist an impulse to defend Parritt from Hickey's snooping (612). As with other themes introduced in act 1, O'Neill hints at how things will turn out eventually. At the end, Larry will give Parritt the help he needs.

Larry's curiosity and reluctant interest in Parritt, which develop throughout act 1, intensify through the rest of the play as Parritt circles closer and closer to the core of his crime. When Hickey drives him downstairs to the party he wants to skip, Parritt immediately provokes Larry by quoting Hickey's appraisal of their struggle. Parritt taunts Larry then apologizes, then returns to the theme of his mother. This time Larry cannot deflect Parritt from telling his version of the fight that ended with Larry's flight. When Rosa had been unfaithful, Parritt recalls, Larry had gotten mad and told her, "I don't like living with a whore," and he plunges through the old man's denials (635).

As Parritt sees it, Larry's anger and rejection made Rosa respect him alone among her many lovers. Parritt consciously identifies with the Larry he perceives: his mother having her succession of men "made home a lousy place. I felt like you did about it. I'd get feeling I was living in a whorehouse—only worse, because she didn't have to make her living—." He merges in his mind his own youthful need for his mother with Larry's lover's need so that he cannot tell the difference. His betrayal of Rosa seems to him analogous to Larry's, and to his ambivalent anger and contempt.

Parritt begs Larry to listen, to try to understand, and Larry continues to resist. Larry starts to leave but allows himself to be drawn back when Parritt promises not to talk about his mother again. He's got to talk, Parritt says, if not to Larry then to Hickey. Larry acknowledges a shared perception when Parritt complains about Hickey, "There's something not human behind his damned grinning and kidding." "Ah! You feel that, too?" Larry asks. Made confident by the moment of mutuality, Parritt insists, "I've got to decide what I've got to do. I've got to tell you Larry." The old man says he won't listen, that he has guessed nothing; Parritt continues his assault on Larry's curiosity.

The next exchange pushes Larry into a position of begging for relief, pleading with the youth: "leave me in peace the little time that's left to me." What pushes Larry to this point is not entirely clear but events seem to proceed as follows. Parritt presents his tale of reading American history, of admiring the founding fathers, of invoking his own pioneer breeding, of rejecting the Movement for reasons, of selling it out as his patriotic duty. Although he later calls the story bunk and a lie, it seems as likely to be partly true as the story about falling in love with the woman who set him up to betray his mother. Considering that he has grown up in the closed society of the Movement, and that he has lost faith in its dogma, it isn't hard to imagine that he might be seduced by American political idealism. If it is hard for him to remember the seduction, it is equally hard for him to recall that he once fell for the tart who betrayed him. Perhaps there is also some truth in the insistence that he did not believe that his mother would be caught. In childhood and adolescence, we seldom can anticipate, or can think clearly, about the full consequences of our acts and wishes.

Parritt has a confused recollection of his betrayal of his mother. He knows he did it, but part of the time he forgets that she is in jail. For him the betrayal has the double reality of a child's wish that a parent die. The anger behind the wish is real enough, and so in a way is the wish for the death; but the child does not really want the parent to stay dead, and not to be there to provide comfort when the anger is spent. Larry and Parritt both react to the reality of the anger and neither can understand the multiple implications of the act.

The complexity of Parritt's feelings and act especially confuse Larry who wants to remove from all problems anything that resists rational explanation. One can intuitively understand Parritt and his act much more easily than one can explain them. Larry, in fact, occasionally shows from that he understands far more about Parritt (and Hickey too) than he admits. The irrational drags him out of his refuge in the grandstand. To acknowledge the irrational is to admit its importance, even to consider that it might lead a reasonable person to act against reason. Driven to plead with Parritt to be left alone, Larry gets no pity from the youth. "Aw, don't pull that pitiful old man junk on me! You old bastard, you'll never die as long as there's a free drink of whiskey left!" Parritt is too practiced a liar not to know deceit when he meets it; and Larry immediately confirms the youth's suspicion: "Look out how you taunt me back into life, I warn you. I might remember the thing they call justice there, and the punishment for—" (637). But Larry can say no more. The eruption of his own anger frightens him; he is about to reveal a wish for Parritt to die, a wish that he can no more tolerate or understand than he can Parritt's betrayal of his mother, and he falls back in exhaustion. He tries to dismiss Parritt with epithets: "To hell with you! You're as mad as Hickey and as big a liar." For the time being, he is spared by the entrance of Pearl and Margie who always drive Parritt into defensive silence.

But in the beginning of act 3, the battle resumes. Larry's ambivalence toward Parritt becomes increasingly obvious. Rocky and Larry talk of Hickey, and Parritt interrupts to call Larry a quitter, "a yellow old faker." Rocky offers to throw Parritt out; but given the chance to be rid of his gadfly, Larry declines, "forcing an indifferent tone." Once again Parritt apologizes, then drifts into talking about the strange connection he feels with Hickey. Learning about Evelyn's death, he says,

started me thinking about Mother—as if she was dead. (With a strange undercurrent of something like satisfaction in his pitying tone) I suppose she might as well be. Inside herself, I mean. It must kill her when she thinks of me—I know she doesn't want to, but she can't help it. After all, I'm her only kid. She used to spoil me and made a pet of me. Once in a great while, I mean. When she remembered me. As if she wanted to make up for something. As if she felt guilty. So she must have loved me a little, even if she never let it interfere with her freedom. (653)

This speech marks the beginning of significant understanding for Parritt. The recollection of life with his mother has complexity of detail and feeling. The childhood he depicts sounds bleak enough to have made him "a serious, lonely little shaver" as Larry has described the boy he once knew. One can understand the note of "satisfaction" in Parritt's tone when he thinks about having had the power to hurt his mother as she has hurt him. The mother he remembers could not often have been a comfortable person nor a comforting one, torn as she was among competing requirements of ideological rigor, commitment to her Movement, the exercise of personal freedom, and the demands of a child. Remembering his childhood makes Parritt turn to the fantasy that must often have been a source of comfort, that Larry, who was kind to him, had been his father.

Whatever Larry has understood of Parritt's account of his mother, he reacts very strongly. He "violently" defends himself against the charge of being Parritt's father and offers proof of his innocence. Rebuffed by the real Larry (as he probably was not by the Larry of his fantasies), Parritt resumes thinking about his mother. His memories reflect covert satisfaction with the knowledge that he has given her the "final knock out." He is not yet conscious of the pleasure he takes in thinking of her in prison as he shows in denying his motive: "But I never thought the cops would get her! You've got to believe that! You've got to see what my only reason was! [. . .] I got stuck on a whore and wanted dough to blow on her and have a good time. That's all I did it for! Just money! Honest!" (654).

O'Neill shows his intention in the stage direction that follows: Parritt "has a terrible grotesque air, in confessing his baseness, of one who gives an excuse which exonerates him from any real guilt." Larry feels revolted and turns to the comfort of speculating to Rocky about how Hickey's wife died; but as he and the bartender talk, Parritt again merges his thoughts of his mother with the idea of Evelyn's death. "You know she'd never committ suicide. She's like you. She'll hang onto life even when there's nothing left but—". Larry meets anger with anger. "And how about you? Be God, if you had any guts or decency—!" Parritt finishes the thought that Larry's conscience inhibits: "I'd take that hop off the fire escape you're too yellow to take, I suppose?" Larry retreats: "No! Who am I to judge? I'm done with judging." In fact Larry constantly judges, but he does not want to know the consequences of his judgments.

Parritt is silent for a long time until Willie offers his legal services. Willie's confusion gives Parritt an excuse to again nag Larry and to apologize. Again he speaks of Rosa, saying that now he understands, that Larry still loves her. "Understanding" Larry's love reminds him of his own ambivalent love for his mother. The knowledge drives him back to insisting that he didn't think Rosa would be caught, and that his entire motive was to get money to spend on a whore.

By now it is clear that Parritt's evasions lead him to insight and the insight is accumulating. He knows he is angry at his mother and also remembers how much he loves her. The more shrilly he insists upon the simple version of his motive, the less the explanation convinces him. He is not far from feeling directly his hatred of his mother as well as his love and need for her, and from also knowing that the anger he feels toward her is much greater than he has let himself consciously know.

And Larry also seems to know, although he continues to want not to know. He leaves Parritt at the table and goes to the bar to drink. He speaks of the Iceman of Death standing drinks, and wonders what brought the figure of speech to his mind. He identifies the phrase with the touch of death he feels on Hickey but he can't think clearly enough about Parritt yet to recognize that the youth also bears the cold touch. At the end of act 3, O'Neill lets the Iceman speak again through Parritt's mouth to deny that Rosa is dead, and insist again that the only motive was money for the girl.

At the beginning of act 4 Larry, Parritt and Hugo sit at the table by the window, with Larry next to the dirty glass. The window, which is directly below the fire escape upstairs, becomes increasingly important as the act develops. Parritt continues his deadly, indirect progress toward knowledge of his crime, motive and guilt. He can think only of his crime and of Larry's refusal to show interest in him. "He couldn't even get drunk," Parritt says about Larry. "There must have been something there he was even more scared to face than he is Hickey and me. I guess he got to looking at the fire escape and thinking how handy it was if he was really sick of life and only had the nerve to die!" (685-86). Above even his intuition about Larry, the guess reveals Parritt's own longing for death. The guess about Larry's thoughts may be partly correct, but Parritt can't empathize enough with Larry to understand how the desperation that drives within him toward destruction differs from Larry's less urgent existential ennui.

Parritt persists in the error. "He's been thinking of me, too, Rocky. Trying to figure a way to get out of helping me! He doesn't want to be bothered understanding. But he does understand all right! He used to love her too. So he thinks I ought to take a hop off the fire escape!" Parritt expects retaliation from his mother's old lover, an expectation that arises from his own judgment against himself. Because he can't always tell the difference between his own thoughts and those he attributes to Larry he confuses his own self-hatred with Larry's motive for trying to ignore him. The youth makes Larry uncomfortable but the old man shows no signs of hating Don, and he partly pities him, however much he detests the act of betrayal. Larry simply wants to be left alone, and to avoid thinking about and feeling for Parritt's situation. Neither Larry nor Parritt can consistently empathize with the other; Parritt cannot because he is occupied by guilt and self-loathing, and Larry because he dreads intimacy which will make him feel anything, and especially feel a guilty responsibility for the youth, a sense of obligation he shuns. He curses the youth for trying to make him his executioner, when Parritt asks for less. Parritt asks only that Larry understand and acknowledge understanding.

Larry rejects Hickey for the same reason he rejects Parritt. Both want understanding, although Hickey hides his demand behind his salesman's spiel for salvation, and requires that understanding fit his own self-justification. But any understanding will have the same result for Larry; it will bring him close to guilt and death. Listening to the salesman confess will make Larry condemn him in his mind and thereby

participate in his execution, just as much as listening to Parritt involves him in the youth's self-hatred. "We may hate you for what you've done here this time," Larry tells Hickey. "but we'll remember the old times, too, when you brought kindness and laughter with you instead of death! We don't want to know things that will make us help send you to the Chair." The remark enrages Parritt who answers for Hickey. "Can't you face anything? Wouldn't I deserve the Chair, too, if I'd—." Parritt suddenly understands a little more fully something he has said in act 3: "It's worse if you kill someone and they have to go on living. I'd be glad of the chair! It'd wipe it out! It'd square me with myself" (691).

The guilt Parritt acknowledges so disturbs Hickey that the salesman drops his usual posture of amused tolerance for the youth. When he tells Larry he wishes to be rid of Parritt, the reason seems to be that Hickey now identifies himself so closely with Parritt that he cannot take for granted being separate. As always, Hickey blames discomfort on something external. "I can't have him pretending there's something in common between him and me." It has been Hickey, not Parritt, who has insisted since their first meeting that they were "members of the same lodge." Hickey recognizes Parritt's ambivalent hatred of his mother and it apparently feels to him as if the youth accuses him of having hated Evelyn. "There was love in my heart, not hate," Hickey counter-accuses, defending himself against a charge no one has spoken, one laid in his own heart. And Parritt denies the counter-accusation: "You're a liar! I don't hate her! And it had nothing to do with her, anyway! You ask Larry!" As he often does, Parritt first reacts to a potential insight by denying it, but he allows the thought to keep working in his mind after he has seemed to dismiss it. A few minutes later, after Hickey has described killing his wife, Parritt finally finds the explanation of his act that he has searched for. "I may as well confess, Larry. There's no use lying any more. You know, anyway. I didn't give a damn about the money. It was because I hated her" (700). The words are catalyst to his moment of recognition, of anagnorisis, and to Larry's.

Anagnorisis, recognition, discovery, insight: it is an event or series of events that seem to lie near the center of what we call tragic in drama or literature. Regardless of whatever Aristotle may have meant in the Poetics, the idea has come to signify momentous discoveries, like that of Oedipus, that the world is radically different from what he—and everyone—has taken for granted. The philosopher Stanley Cavell describes the moment of philosophical enlightenment in a way that seems to apply equally well to personal insight and to the experience of characters in literary tragedy. In an essay about the philosopher Wittgenstein's style of thinking, Cavell writes:

[The] problems are solved only when they disappear, and answers are arrived at only when there are no longer questions. [. . .] The more one learns, so to speak, the hang of oneself, and mounts one's problems, the less one is able to say what one has learned; not because you have forgotten what it was, but because nothing you said would seem like an answer or a solution: there is no longer any question or problem which your words would match. You have reached conviction, but not about a proposition; and consistency, but not in a theory. You are different, what you recognize as problems are different, your world is different. (85-86)

The world is different! Oedipus goes from Corinth to Delphi with a question: who are my parents? By the time he eventually has an answer, he is king of Thebes, husband of Jocasta, and the question as he previously meant it is meaningless. The world he lives in has come to seem so different from what he had previously assumed that the words "Laius and Jocasta" have entirely different meanings from any he could have anticipated. Sophocles makes him—and the audience—see the emptiness of the initial assumptions about the world—without making Oedipus seem shallow or trivial. Once Oedipus had believed that by knowing the future he could avoid the dreadful thing foretold. Now he knows that knowledge conveys no power beyond itself, that for one who has been told something about the future, life must include observing human impotence. Formerly Oedipus had believed reason and knowledge gave people power over their circumstances; after, he knows only that his former belief was incorrect.

The tragedy in The Iceman Cometh unfolds in the same manner as in Oedipus the King. In the absence of dramatic action, the audience must occupy itself by witnessing a process of change that goes on in the minds of the characters. Oedipus seeks the murderer of Laius by examining witnesses and reasoning from the facts he learns. Gradually he must conjecture that Laius may have been the man who attacked him at the place where three roads meet, the man Oedipus killed. Still he feels no guilt for the killing, for he had simply defended himself. But if the man was his father . . . and if the woman, his wife, is his mother . . . .

Anagnorisis, when it comes, comes in the merging of feeling with thought. Reason had separated the one from the other during the process of cross-questioning and allowed Oedipus to retain some degree of detachment. The change comes less from the simple discovery of new facts than from the emotions attached to the facts. So it is as Larry and Parritt struggle to know and not to know the things that haunt them, Parritt's knowledge of his crime, Larry's knowledge of mortality. O'Neill places Larry's and Parritt's reactions to insight in contrast to the reaction of Hickey.

During the salesman's narrative, Parritt continues to identify with Hickey, so intensely that when the salesman lets slip that he called Evelyn a "damned bitch" after killing her, Parritt continues with a truth-seeking that Hickey cannot tolerate. "Yes, that's it!" Parritt says. "Her and the damned old Movement pipe dream! Eh, Larry?" (701). Parritt begins to put feelings together with fragments of memory. He has known in a general way that he resented his mother putting her Cause above all other claims. Vague resentment gives way to the felt certainty that he hated her, and that hatred led him to betray her to the police. If Parritt were still interested in the question, he would find that the explanation encompasses the partial truth underlying the lie of wanting money to spend on a tart: hating his mother made him vulnerable to the girl put on him by the police. But the earlier questions have now receded as Parritt gets used to knowing more directly the love and hatred he feels toward his mother, and he understands them as he cannot have done before.

When Parritt accepts the painful insight he stands in sharp contrasts to Hickey who at first denies hating Evelyn, and then asserts that if he did he must have been crazy. Parritt tolerates no such evasions or explanations. He lives and dies by a harsher, more ancient sense of justice than Hickey imagines. Or, we may say, he cannot tolerate continuing to lie to himself. His was a clan crime; judgment and punishment must be executed within the family. Parritt forces Larry to resume a tribal position, to act in the place of the mother he has lost and the father he has never known. He teaches Larry what the old man must do and why. When Larry shows compassion for the departed Hickey, Parritt tells him:

Yes, but he isn't the only one who needs peace, Larry. He's lucky. He's through, now. It's all decided for him. I wish it was decided for me. I've never been any good at deciding things. Even about selling out, it was the tart the detective agency got after me who put it in my mind. You remember what Mother's like, Larry. She makes all the decisions. She's always decided what I must do. She doesn't like anyone to be free but herself. (704).

Parritt tries to make Larry understand that despite his eighteen years he remains a partly dependent child. He may know what he must do, but he cannot act without the help and support of having his own judgment confirmed. Still suffering the pain of feeling Hickey's desperate guilt, Larry cannot react to Parritt. The youth continues:

I suppose you think I ought to have made those dicks take me away with Hickey. But how could I prove it, Larry? They'd think I was nutty. Because she's still alive. You're the only one who can understand how guilty I am. Because you know her and what I've done to her. You know I'm really much guiltier than he is. You know what I did is a much worse murder. Because she is dead and yet she has to live. For a while. But she can't live long in jail. She loves freedom too much. And I can't kid myself like Hickey, that she's at peace. As long as she lives, she'll never be able to forget what I've done to her even in her sleep. She'll never have a second's peace. (704)

Both poles of Parritt's ambivalent love and hatred show in his analysis of his crime. It thrills him to have, for once, the power to force his mother to pay him total attention. Yet compassion for her humiliation and confinement continue to intensify his guilt. His feelings are as complex as those that Larry dreads and denies. Parritt has now pushed the old man to his limit and seems to know it. "And I'm not putting up any bluff, either, that I was crazy afterwards when I laughed to myself and thought `you know what you can do with your freedom pipe dream now, don't you, you damned old bitch!'" (704).

The rhetoric, whether a memory or borrowed from Hickey, causes Larry's self-control to snap. "Go! Get the hell out of life, God damn you, before I choke it out of you! Go up—!" Even words spoken out of angry impulse serve. Knowing that he has made Larry feel and understand his guilt transforms Parritt. The Oresteian alienation, the pursuit by his mother's avenging furies, the isolation unto madness, are partly appeased. If he cannot free his mother from prison, he can at least free her from her humiliation, and thus free himself from his bondage to her. He can even derive amusement from being able to predict how she will rationalize his act of betrayal.

It'll give her the chance to play the great uncorruptible mother of the Revolution, whose only child is the Proletariat. She'll be able to say: "Justice is done! So may all traitors die!" She'll be able to say "I am glad he's dead! Long live the Revolution!" (He adds with a final implacable jeer) You know her, Larry! Always a ham. (704-05)

The final jeer confirms that Parritt, as he goes upstairs, continues to feel as bound by his identification with his mother as when she was present to make his decisions for him. It shows how little chance he might have had ever to reach any kind of independence, save through an act of fatal desperation or through death itself.

Larry hears the power of almost intolerably mixed feelings that stir the youth's soul and repeats the injunction to "go up" without the rage of the former moment. "Go, for the love of Christ, you mad tortured bastard, for your own sake!" Parritt hears the old man's empathy and nearly crumbles because of it. Like Larry, he tolerates derision far better than compassion. But he can pat Larry's arm and say with surprising grace, "Jesus, Larry, thanks. That's kind. I knew you were the only one who could understand my side of it." As he walks to the stairway, Hugo stirs to demand a drink. Rosa's son to the end, Parritt "Puts on an act of dramatic bravado" worthy of his mother's theatrics. "Sure I will, Hugo! Tomorrow! Beneath the willow trees!"

If one can earn relief from pain, Parritt has earned it by the labor he has waged to know and acknowledge his guilt. O'Neill compels an audience to take Parritt with the seriousness we give to tragic figures, even to characters as strange and alienated as, say, Philoctetes or Ajax of Sophocles. In cultures like Classical Greece where suicide did not seem always or inherently shameful, Parritt's end—like that of Ajax after his madness—might have been perceived as restoring a measure of honor to a life marked for misfortune. If Parritt's centrality in Iceman has been underemphasized, it may be because the play is relatively new. Insufficient time has passed for understanding its overall shape as well as its intricacies. O'Neill is certainly not the first dramatist to try to integrate comic, realistic and tragic sensibilities into a single work with each overlaid upon the others (Shakespeare, Wagner and Chekhov come immediately to mind). But in doing so, any dramatist risks being called complex and even confusing. Yet in the end, all the points of view in the play are deeply integrated with each other, and each has an importance which would make its absence diminish the others. Parritt stands at the center of the play's tragic sensibility.

The place of Larry is more difficult to discover. The strongest argument for evidence of the tragic in Larry has to do with his recognition of Parritt's need for community, and the gifts of momentary understanding he gives the boy. But one looks in vain for Larry to express whatever he may have understood. His last speech, in response to Parritt's fall, is made remarkably unclear when Larry twice invokes Hickey as an expert on pity and death.

LARRY: (In a whisper of horrified pity) Poor devil! (A long forgotten faith returns to him for a moment and he mumbles) God rest his soul in peace. (He opens his eyes—with a bitter self-derision) Ah, the damned pity—the wrong kind, as Hickey said! Be God, there's no hope! I'll never be a success in the grandstand—or anywhere else! Life is too much for me! I'll be a weak fool looking with pity at the two sides of everything till the day I die! (With an intense bitter sincerity) May that day come soon! (He pauses startedly, surprised at himself—then with a sardonic grin) Be God, I'm the only real convert to death Hickey made here. From the bottom of my coward's heart I mean that now! (710)

It seems difficult to make a case that the speech shows any insight or any sense that he has grasped the significance of Parritt's decision and act, or any sense of the tragic, except that he seems to feel mortality more deeply. The change, if any, is obscured by his reference to learning from Hickey about death. If the play has shown anything clearly it is that Hickey is a poor authority on pity and death. However sincerely misguided the salesman may be in his time of extremity, he begins from the moment of his first entrance to tell his friends a series of admittedly calculated lies concerning the killing of his wife. He does not seek, like Parritt, to discover the motive for his act; but instead seeks to lead his friends to confirm his self-justification, that he did it to save her from himself. His version of pity allows him to deny the pain he causes his friends. Of all the characters, Hickey most conspicuously denies the reality of death—as when he tells the policemen who lead him out how anxious he is to go to the chair, that he has to explain to Evelyn that he was insane when he called her a damn bitch, that he knows she has already forgiven him.

Perhaps invoking the name of Hickey doesn't matter. Perhaps Larry believes Hickey feels more truly than he can speak or act. Susan L. Cole believes that the experience of the play's action has taught Larry to mourn and that the blessing he asks for Parritt shows "Aristotelian tragic catharsis in a whisper" (Cole 165). Her argument carries conviction, and so does that by Judith Barlow who writes: "Larry must live with the pain of his pity for humanity" (62).

Larry remains to suffer the consequences of knowledge and feeling. O'Neill learned from Strindberg and Nietzsche and Shakespeare and the Greeks that for the serious person life promises mostly suffering. Suffering in itself may have no value but it is evidence that one is fully alive, and fully engaged with life. Something in Larry has awakened to suffer having knowledge of life and death. If we in an audience cannot help but identify with Larry, we may too come to know something of value along with the pain.

WORKS CITED

Barlow, Judith. Final Acts: The Creation of Three Late O'Neill Plays. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.

Cavell, Stanley. Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Cole, Susan Letzler. The Absent One: Mourning Ritual, Tragedy, and the Performance of Ambivalence. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985.

Frazer, Winifred. Love as Death in The Iceman Cometh. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1967.

Larner, Daniel. "O'Neill's Fear and Pity: The Dionysian Living Death." eOneill.com. 22 Feb. 2006 <http://www.eoneill.com/library/essays/index.htm>.

Lee, Robert C. "Evangelism and Anarchy in The Iceman Cometh," Modern Drama 12 (1969), 173-186.

Manheim, Michael. Eugene O'Neill's New Language of Kinship. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1982.

Mason, H.A. The Tragic Plane. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1985.

O'Neill, Eugene. The Iceman Cometh. Complete Plays 1932-1943. Ed. Travis Bogard. Vol. 3. New York: Library of America, 1988. 561-711.

Raleigh, John Henry. The Plays of Eugene O'Neill. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965.