Iceman Cometh Sparknotes

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The Iceman Cometh depicts a group of rock-bottom individuals who spend their days and nights at Harry Hope’s Saloon. They are in and out of drunken stupor and all they have left is their illusionary pasts and glorified pipe dreams for their future. The character Hickey is an important figure to this small community and they look forward to his annual visits, but this time he is very different and they are upset by his claims to renounce their pipe dreams in order to find peace. Eventually, Hickey realizes the only chance at peace is through death. While the bar inhabitants conclude Hickey’s insanity, Larry and Parritt are the only ones who see the truth in what he was saying. O’Neill’s play shows the paradox of the crazy truth and true craziness, …show more content…

Hickey is faced with his own guilt and unable to accept it he claims insanity to the group and welcomes death as an escape. Upon his claims to insanity, the group can now go back to their own illusions, to which they celebrate, able to taste the alcohol again. Hickey’s arrival represents the arrival of death, which is the only thing left when humans let go of their pipe dreams because only then we are subject to the miserable truth about humanity. He also uses his pipe dream as a means of avoiding his own guilt, which he never fully accepts. Since Hickey represents death and thus the true depravity of life, his pleas of insanity represent the crazy truth. This means that the truth was so terrible that the only way to explain it was to call it insane. The illusion of insanity protects these people from this depravity. When in reality all of these characters except for Larry are the ones that are truly insane because they are out of touch with reality due to their illusionary world they …show more content…

As Larry says, “To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say” (O’Neill, pg. 12). Larry makes a good point that we don’t really have any basis to call something true and something untrue. There are certain things that are obviously true but humans tend to view their popular beliefs with the same validity as scientific fact. And anyone who opposes it is seen as wrong and crazy. It could be possible that maybe the things society deems true are actually just a distortion of our damaged minds and that the opinions we view as crazy are actually true. It is in human nature to protect ourselves from things that may cause us harm and things we don’t understand because we fear the

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