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Alienation in The Zoo Story by Edward Albee

龙源期刊网 https://www.sodocs.net/doc/9b18279654.html,

Alienation in The Zoo Story by Edward Albee

作者:杜利霞

来源:《课程教育研究·上》2015年第04期

【Abstract】This paper is a study of the theme of alienation and isolation in The Zoo Story by Edward Albee. From this study, we can see that, Edward Albee presented us with the freezing aloofness in modern society in such a short one?鄄act play. In modern society, everyone lives in a cage, big or small, luxurious or shabby, like Peter and Jerry in the play.

【key words】alienation;isolation;cage;imprisonment;conformity;confrontation

【中图分类号】G64 【文献标识码】A 【文章编号】2095-3089(2015)04-0103-01

The Zoo Story was Albee’s first produced play, and has been proclaimed by Christopher Bigsby “the most impressive debut by any American dramatist”.(Bigsby , 129) Like the work o f many prophets, though, Albee’s play premiered outside his native land in a workshop production in German at the Schiller Theatre in West Germany in 1959, as part of a double bill with Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.

What Albee has written in The Zoo Story is a modern morality play. The theme is the centuries?鄄old one of human isolation and salvation through sacrifice. Man in his natural state is alone, a prisoner of self. Pretending that he is not alone, he surrounds himself with things and ideas that bolster 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 himself, he is driven to prove his kinship with all other things and creatures. In proving this kinship 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 by an act of love, a sacrifice, so great that it altogether destroys the self that imprisons him, that it kills him. Albee, in recreating this theme, creats a dialectic through the polar opposites of character, geography, fictionalities, and even props—Jerry versus Peter; the rooming house versus Central Park; freedom versus imprisonment; conformity versus confrontation.

The play starts with two men of contrasted types on a park bench. Peter in his early forties is obviously an “Average Middle Class Father”.He wears a tweed jacket, smokes a pipe, reads a book through horn?鄄rimmed glasses, and does not like conversing with strangers. He is passive, inhibited, unwilling to give up his solitude for confrontation. Living the credo of the “Organizational Man”, Peter is an upper?鄄middle?鄄class man whose job, family, and lifestyle validate the mainstream rituals of the Eisenhower 1950s. Peter lives by a routine that restricts and defines him: he works for a publisher, has a wife who prescribes his pleasures, raises two daughters, keeps two parakeets, and

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