The dramatic action of the play is devoted to the interaction of the reformer with his subjects in an isolated playfield. The pattern in question includes three elements: (1) the subjects of reformation (the characters) (2) the topos, which is the arena of reformation and (3) the reformer who is devoted to converting the subjects to his doctrine or vision. O’Neill’s dramatic pattern serves as the medium that enables the playwright to convey his message in the play effectively. O'Neill's self-appointed savior is presented as an anti-savior, under whose spell the “contented” characters become no more than walking corpses that wander in an icy hell (Bogard 415).ĤThis paper aims to analyze the pattern of reformation O'Neill uses in order to put together his pessimistic vision. It dramatizes O’Neill's lack faith in the efficacy of saviors or reformers. Louis Broussard views the play as “a negating epilogue” to O’Neill’s somewhat optimistic play, Days without End, and holds that “it is a refutation of every trace of optimism that appears earlier in his plays' (Broussard 30).ģThe play goes beyond expressing O'Neill's bleak vision of modern life to stress the futility of any hope of reformation in our times. In The Iceman Cometh, O’Neill has exceeded Ibsen, Gorky, Strindberg and the Greeks in his depiction of the pitiable condition of mankind.

O’Neill portrays man as “too frail to withstand the stark truth of reality and must, in order to survive, renounce in favor of self-delusion' (Frenz 82). Like Ibsen in The Wild Duck, O’Neill dramatizes “the human condition as such that man cannot live without clinging to some illusion of life-lie' (Frenz 79). It is really the first play of a trilogy that will dig at the roots of the sickness of today as I feel it - the death of an old God and the failure of science and materialism to give any satisfying new one for the surviving primitive religious instinct to find a meaning for life in, and to comfort its fears of death with (O’Neill in Clark 120).ĢThe world, for O’Neill, has become a wasteland in which there is nowhere to go, and nothing is worth having.

The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill