著者

山内 邦臣

出版者

一般財団法人 日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究 (ISSN:00393649)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.42, no.2, pp.223-233, 1966

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The Iceman Cometh, as "part of an interlocking series of plays"...A Moon for the Misbegotten, A Touch of the Poet and Long Day's Journey into Night...was written in 1939 during a period of depression and anxiety for O'Neill which he attributed to the impending war, his family troubles, his own weakening health and also to his dissatisfaction with, and finally destroying the first two of long cycle-plays, his would-be monumental works. Seeing the end of his own life approaching, he became immersed in his own past...the years of 1911 and 1912, those of destitution, hopelessness and death longing. His early identification with the pipe-dreamers at Jimmy the Priests, a dilapidated flophouse-saloon on the New York waterfront, was now transmuted into an expression of "hopeless hope", "existential dilemma"... his obsessed life-and-death philosophy. The Iceman Cometh, as Mr. and Mrs. Gelb have said, having "subsurfaces and sub-subsurfaces" and being "the most intricately and symbolically coded of all O'Neill's plays", "has been lengthily analyzed in print from psychiatric, religious and metaphysical viewpoints," "and may ultimately accumulate as large a body of scholarly discourse as Hamlet" The play, if not his greatest masterpiece, but surely one of his most labored works, might be said to give interesting problems but also be tantalizing and even too difficult to grasp what the author wished to signify. The aim of this paper is merely to concentrate, through drawing the contour and conveying the flavor of the play, rather upon pointing out the controversial points than upon elucidating or solving them. As is exemplified by H. Muchnic's Circe's Swine: Plays by Gorky and O'Neill, we might meet with interesting problems in the comparative study of Gorky's The Lower Depth and O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, both of which are very much alike, not only in setting, plot and structure, but in aesthetic conception, which still have the essential difference ; the former based on a respect for humanity and the latter on a hopeless understanding of them; the former laying a stress on an intellectual grasp of values, the materialist doctrine of self-reliant, practical action, the latter putting an emphasis on the paradoxes of existence, a prophecy of doom, the Christian ideal of humility and inactive faith. We also might find the similar cases in the comparative study of O'Neill's play on one side and Arthur Miller's The Death of a Salesman, Elmer Rice's Street Scene or Sidney Kingsley's Dead End on the other. The poetic and mystical features, essential to O'Neill, could be traced in pursuing what is meant and symbolized by 'The Iceman' of the title, the symbolization or meaning of the title 'The Iceman Cometh' giving us another fundamental problem. According to what Prof. Cyrus Day, after developing a fascinating interpretation of the religious symbolism in The Iceman Cometh, has pointed out in his Modern Drama, we might find "several tantalizing resemblances" between the play and the New Testament, which will give us another tempting but significant problem. These above-mentioned problems, together with the ones we might be given in analyzing the dramaturgy of the play, await us to be made clear.