The Iceman Cometh Literary Elements

Drama

English

Downtown Manhattan, West Side (the Village), New York City; bar; 1912

Third-person narration in form of playwright's stage directions

Tone: Each character's words and behavior suggests a different tone, ranging from morose to irritable to frenzied to sinister. The tone of the work is difficult to pin down because of all of the voices, but within all of them Eugene O'Neill's tone seems to be pitying, amused, and casual.

Mood: Tense, uneasy, volatile, fraught.

Protagonist: Larry, Hope; Antagonist: Hickey

Whether or not Hickey will be able to fully disabuse the characters of their pipe dreams so they putatively will be able to have peace and self-awareness.

Hickey admits he shot and killed his wife.

"I'm damned sure he brought death here with him. I feel the cold touch of it on him" (Larry, 138, speaking of Hickey).

"No, I'm sorry to have to tell you my poor wife was killed." (Hickey, 175)

1. "he's a Judas who ought to be boiled in oil" -Parritt references Judas Iscariot who betrayed Jesus; he does this to depict how his Mother feels about people who betray the Movement
2. "what Heine wrote in his poem to morphine" -Heinrich Heine's poem "Morphine"
3. "As Vespasian remarked, the smell of whiskey is sweet" -a Roman emperor
4. "Bull Moosers" -the "Bull Moose" Progressive Party under which Theodore Roosevelt ran for the 1912 presidential election
5. "President of the W.C.T.U." -Women's Christian Temperance Union, a leading Prohibition group
6. Robespierre -the French Revolution radical leader

The staging consists of one set - the backroom of the saloon. It is dark, dingy and crowded - full of men living desperate lives. Life goes on without them outside - and offstage.

See Imagery for specific examples within the play.

Critic Stephen F. Bloom writes, "O'Neill finally captures the despairing paradox of the human condition, as he sees it, in the contrast between the romantic myth of intoxication and the realistic symptoms and effects of alcoholism." Alcohol can make things light and better, but it can also destroy and deaden. This play gives us the whole spectrum.

Parritt and Hickey's behavior toward Mother and Evelyn, respectively, are paralleled in Hickey's confession narrative.

"Bad luck come in de door when Hickey come" (Joe, 145).

-Monologue: Larry and Hickey give these
-Metonymy: "Shut your damned trap" (Larry, 109), referring to mouth