Themes and Meanings
Eugene O’Neill himself remarked that The Iceman Cometh has little plot in the ordinary sense; he believed that the theme was carried primarily by the characters. The residents of the boardinghouse are all failures; all were onetime viable members of society, but all have been kept from having to face their degeneration by the illusion that he or she will or at least could make up for that failure and become a success. They help sustain one another by professing mutual belief in one another’s pipe dreams. O’Neill’s grim point is that all people have such dreams and that any attempt to live without them is doomed. Even the determination to live without illusions or the conviction that one has moved beyond such dreams through philosophy or cynicism is itself usually a pipe dream. That even a genuine disillusionment cannot solve this problem is exemplified by Larry’s shattered condition at the end of the play: Dreams, even delusory ones, may constitute a positive, if not finally optimistic, note in this bleak context.
The relatively straightforward theme is given depth and resonance by being reinforced at several different levels. Character names are symbolic, beginning with that of Harry Hope, who runs a hotel full of drifters living on impossible hopes. Parritt is, as his name implies, a symbolic parrot in his role as a police informer; the greedy bartender is named Pioggi, “pig.” The revolutionary Hugo Kalmar’s surname is a...
(The entire section is 439 words.)