THE ZOO STORY
A BY EDWARD ALBEE
1. CHARACTER AND CHARACTERIZATION
Major:
Peter : male, a middle-aged (40's-50's)Î Eccentric - emotionally unstable - wild , Nationality - White (American) , sensitive to others' feelings - hard edged , Cynical sense of humor , Very much smarter than other characters
Jerry : male, a young, (20's-30’s) Î business executive, Smart , eccentric , throughout most of the book, sensitive to others' feelings , Cynical sense of humor , Average intelligence - Very much smarter than other characters , average physique - quite fatty
2. PLOT:
Peter, a middle-aged publishing executive sits peacefully reading in the sunlight in Central Park. There enters a second man, the antithesis of the first. He is Jerry, a young, unkempt and undisciplined vagrant. Where Peter is neat, ordered, well-to-do, conventional, the vagrant Jerry is a soul in torture and rebellion. He longs to communicate so fiercely that, when he does make the attempt, he alternately frightens and repels his listener. He is a man drained of all hope who, in his passion for company, seeks to drain his companion. With ironic humor and unrelenting suspense, we see the young savage slowly but relentlessly bring his victim down to his own atavistic level and initiate a shocking and horrible ending.
· Exposition:
Peter, a middle-aged publishing executive sits in Central Park Zoo peacefully reading and appears neat and well off, he is approached by a younger man the antithesis of the first disheveled and dirty. This man, Jerry a young is a soul in torture and rebellion, Unkempt and undisciplined vagrant, brings up questions that seem silly and give the play great humor but deal with religion and sexuality (particularly homosexuality).
· Complication:
Peter, an average American, is confronted by Jerry, a lonely man from the wrong side of the park. Jerry tries to teach Peter the realities of life that Peter has tried to ignore. He tries to teach Peter the nature of human existence and relationships. Peter longs to communicate so fiercely that, when he does make the attempt, he alternately frightens and repels his listener. He is a man drained of all hope who, in his passion for company, seeks to drain his companion.
· Climax:
Peter is probably too locked inside himself and his conservative outlook on life to open up enough to show himself willingly, and at the same time he is not aware enough to listen intelligently, especially to such a contradictory and devious character as Jerry. He never really knows what is going on in his bewildering communication with Jerry. Through a serious of failed conversations and misinterpretations of the act of love, Jerry begins his experiment to see if the middle class Americas are animals after all. Peter has killed Jerry before he even knows what has happened. In one sense, then, from Jerry's point of view, the communication is perfect--he accomplishes precisely what he wants to accomplish. From Peter's point of view, of course, what has happened to him, how Jerry has manipulated him into murder, will probably not come clear to him for a long while, if ever. Jerry has achieved what he wanted from the encounter--death. Peter has no idea what hit him.
· Resolution:
At the same time, however, one can say that Jerry is as deluded as Peter in terms of communication and what Jerry believes can be accomplished through communication. Perhaps the heart of the play (aside from Jerry's death at Peter's hand) Jerry tells about his complex "relationship" with the landlady's dog. If Jerry were to put as much time, care, creativity, and effort into establishing communication with a human being that he put into coming to some sort of mutually acceptable and respectful understanding with that dog, he would probably have found human companionship and would not be seeking to be murdered by Peter in order to escape his pain. In addition, because Jerry is so profoundly conflicted with respect to his parents and his sexuality,
3. SETTING:
Setting of place
l Deals with WHERE the story takes place
Central Park l Frequently explicit, occasionally implicit
(In New York) Setting of Time
l Deals with WHEN the story takes place
1. morning in sunlight
4. POINT OF VIEW
Non-participant
l Narrator does not introduce as a character, because the narrator just presenter of the Peter and Jerry
l
5. STYLE
l Grammatical Structure (in Narration and Dialogues) Standard
l Sentence Construction (in Narration is long sentences and Dialogues is short sentences just conversation )
l Diction
l Special Expression: gasping for breath, and stammer
l Dialect: like said “ yes”
6. The kind of the story
l This story is classified as “man vs. society”, because the conflict arises between Peter and Jerry
