Iceman Cometh Sparknotes

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,

leaving us to question what is actually insane. The play The Iceman Cometh portrays characters as being insane because they are without pipe dreams, but this is only because the society in which the characters live in is built on these illusions that protect them from the harsh reality. This reveals a quality of human nature that arises when we fear something, calling it insane.
O’Neill believed there was no hope for humanity and that death was the only escape, but humans are too fragile to accept this terrible reality so we create pipe dreams in order to cling to a “life.” This is what society is built upon, illusions, and that is why when Hickey tells everyone to give them up they are confused and upset. The illusions created by the bar inhabitants keep them from realizing the truth about their lives, that they have nothing to live for and can only find peace through death. But how can they even begin to believe this harsh reality? It is saying that the only thing that defines their life is just a bunch of lies. This gives humans something to strive for and hope to achieve someday but O’Neill points out that these pipe dreams are just meant to keep us from the miserable world we live in. So, it can be inferred that the characters that see Hickey as insane may be just as insane as he is. This is because they are essentially living a lie. They are clinging to a so-called life based on illusions and dreams for the future that will never come true. This questions societal norms and how humanity detests those who go against them and sees an opposing view as crazy. But is it really crazy? Or are humans so brainwashed by these norms that we are blind to reality because it’s too hard to believe. That’s what O’Neill is trying to show. The characters in this play have failed at life and are shut off from the world, leaving the bar to be a sort of limbo between life and death. All that is left for these people is death but they refuse to greet death by clinging onto their pipe dreams. They choose not to address the harsh reality of their present lives because it means they must let go of the last thing that gives them life.
Hickey, Larry, and Parritt are the only characters that realize the truth about their depressing world through the abandonment of their pipe dreams, allowing them to welcome death. Hickey is glorified by the people at the bar for his jokes and the fact that he buys them nice alcohol. He is one of the hopes for the future that they cling onto because he gives meaning to their otherwise worthless existence. Instead Hickey has come to rescue the bar inhabitants from their unhappy lives by having them abandon their pipe dreams, which he claims he has done and has found happiness. But instead this does the opposite and his friends are worse off. This is because without their pipe dreams they are faced with the cold hard truth. For example, Harry has never left the bar ever since the death of his “beloved” wife. When he finally does leave the bar and quickly returns, afraid of the new world, he is defeated and unable to drink away the sadness he is feeling. He then admits that he never actually liked his wife even though he says he misses her everyday. Harry’s relinquishment of his illusions from the past and future expose him to the unforgiving truth. This occurs to everyone else when they return and Hickey realizes his mistake and abandons his final pipe dream, that being that he killed his wife in order to find peace.
Hickey’s confession proves his attempt at salvation to be false, showing that there is no saving the people at the bar either.

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

create.
The characters in the bar all share a distorted outlook resulting from their damaged minds. Since they represent society as a whole, this shows the insanity of modern human society. It is interesting to think about certain norms that have been permanently instilled in our minds through years of existence, so anything that goes against it may be called crazy.
But how can we know what's true and what's not?

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

unknown.
So in The Iceman Cometh, it is no surprise that we see this group of people that creates lies and illusions to protect themselves from their reality because they cannot face death, which is the only escape from the miserable world they live in. Humans try to avoid things that undermine their core values, which explains why we see the bar inhabitants telling Hickey to stop going into details about murdering his wife. This is because they have a glorified illusion of Hickey that gives them life and his confession destroys that, which leads them to only remember the old Hickey and explain his outburst as insanity. So this represents how humans would rather live a life based on a lie rather than face the truth because it scares them. Death is a scary thing and Larry explains, “The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober” (pg. 12). Humans choose a lie in order to live and that is what’s really insane. Larry is the only one left standing who sees the world for what it truly is, while the others are ignorant to it because they are blinded by their illusions and pipe dreams.