ANALYSIS OF DRAMA ENTITLED “ZOO STORY”
By:
EDWARD ALBEE
This explanation deals with structural elements in “ZOO STORY”. The structural elements generally consist of:
1. Character and Characterization
There are two kinds of character, namely major character and minor character. Meanwhile, characterization is development of character within a particular work. It represents the qualities of the characters physically, mentally and socially. There are as follows.
a. Peter
Peter is a middle-class publishing executive with a wife, two daughters, two cats and two parakeets who lives in ignorance of the world outside his settled life. A plain-looking man in his early 40s who smokes a pipe and carries horn-rimmed glasses. His dress and manner are that of a younger man.
b. Jerry
Jerry is an isolated and disheartened man who lives in a boarding house and is very troubled. A man in his late 30s, carelessly dressed, once muscular and handsome. He is weary.
2. Setting
Setting of a literary work consists of two broader setting. Firstly, setting of time. Secondly, is setting of place.
a. Setting of time: on a sunny afternoon.
b. Setting of place
Mostly, setting of place happened in New York's Central Park Zoo.
3. Plot
While Peter is reading a book on a bench in Central Park, he is interrupted by Jerry, a total stranger, who announces that he has just been to the zoo. Anxious to return to his reading, Peter reacts with merely vague interest and lights his pipe, but he is immediately made uncomfortable by Jerry’s queries about his marital status, children, work, and manage of cats and parakeets. After repeating that he has been to the zoo and that Peter will read about it in the papers the next day if he does not see it on television that very night, Jerry follows several digressions about sociological class distinctions, literary tastes, and his daylong wanderings. He also gives a detailed description of his rooming house and its characters on the Upper West Side. Peter is embarrassed to hear these sordid details. Jerry says that, unlike Peter, he owns little except for toilet articles, pornographic playing cards, eight or nine books, cutlery, empty picture frames, an old Western Union typewriter that prints nothing but capital letters, and a small box containing letters and some sea-rounded rocks that he picked up on a beach when he was a boy.
Then he tells of his mother’s desertion of his father and him, as well as her promiscuity, alcoholism, and death at Christmas. He continues with his father’s accidental death and the demise, on Jerry’s high school graduation day, of his guardian, a dour aunt. Jerry confides that his relationships with women are limited to solitary encounters with prostitutes and that his only love affair was a brief one, at age fifteen, with a Greek boy. Then he launches into a long monologue about his disgusting, lusty, alcoholic landlady and her ugly, savage black dog that attacked Jerry daily whenever he tried to enter the rooming house, although he attempted to pacify it by feeding it hamburger for six days. On the seventh day, he poisoned the meat, and the dog fell extremely ill. Strangely, Jerry no longer wanted the dog to die; he had come to believe that if he could somehow make contact with the dog, he could then make contact with people. The moment of contact passed, however, and was lost. From then on, Jerry and the dog lapsed into mutual indifference. Jerry claims to have learned from this misadventure that kindness and cruelty, like other conflicting emotions, are the reality of being. This story has a hypnotic effect on Peter, who makes no comment during its lengthy recitation. Grotesquely exhausted at the end of the story, Jerry sits down on the bench beside Peter and sees that he has annoyed and confused Peter instead of making a breakthrough in communication. Suddenly playful, he tickles Peter’s ribs, driving Peter into almost hysterical laughter. He pokes Peter, then punches him in the arm and forces him to move down the bench. Easily goaded by Jerry’s insults to his manhood, Peter decides to fight for the bench, but when Jerry clicks open a knife and tosses it at him, Peter refuses to pick it up. Jerry rushes over, grabs him by the collar, slaps him, spits on his face, and forces Peter to dart for the knife.
Then, sighing heavily, Jerry charges Peter and impales himself on the knife. As Jerry crumbles back onto the bench, with his eyes and mouth wide in agony, his voice acquires an eerie remoteness. Peter is transfixed as Jerry, with faint laughter, tries to summarize in broken, disjointed sentences his knowledge of his own actions. The world, he has found, is a zoo, and he thanks Peter for ending his anguished life. Slowly wiping clean the knife handle with his own handkerchief, Jerry urges Peter to hurry away. As Peter retreats with a pitiable howl, Jerry ends the play with a combination of scornful mockery and a desperate supplication to the God who failed to give him a cure for his desperate alienation.
4. Point of View
It is way the author tells the readers about his story by using narrators. In “Zoo Story” using the third person. Narrator is not mentioned directly, only telling the story.
5. Style
a. Grammatical structure
Grammatical structure is informal both in narration and dialogue the point of his style and using the easy word. So it is easy to get understanding.
b. Sentence construction
The sentence construction in “zoo story” tends to be long and short sentence. The author usually uses language sentence construction in narration, when he describes some detailed information.
c. Diction
The choice of words are easy to understand. Mostly used as dialogues form.
6. Theme
The author does not state the theme explicitly. He just gives some clues, so the readers have to comprehend and predict through the whole of story to get the message.
The theme used within this story is isolation. Regardless of who you are, most people have felt isolation at one point in time during their life. Anyone can really relate to this theme the author used in this play. Jerry feels isolated from the world because he has no one to turn to or talk to. No one really knows if he chooses to be like this or not though. Jerry’s isolation keeps him from communicating with other people while he lives by himself in a room in a 4-story boarding house. Jerry could have isolated himself from everyone else as a defensive trait. Jerry could have been afraid of something harming him or in that sort of nature so he chose to isolate himself from people in general so no harm could come to his well being.
Conclusion
1. Kind of Drama
The kind of drama can be related to “man versus society”. This reason is based on the story told about human and society especially in conflict arises between Peter and Jerry.
By:
Laili Agustina
A 320080109
