Comparative Literature: East & West

Series 1

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Waiting for Tomorrow? — A Comparative Study of

The Iceman Cometh and Waiting for Godot

Shu HONG

To cite this article: Shu HONG (2014) Waiting for Tomorrow? — A Comparative Study of The
Iceman�Cometh�and�Waiting�for�Godot, Comparative Literature: East & West, 22:1, 95-104, DOI:
10.1080/25723618.2014.12015462

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 Waiting for Tomorrow?
-A Comparative Study of The Iceman Cometh and Waiting for Godot

Shu HONG
Sichuan University

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Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953), the Noble Prize winner of 1936 and four times
Pulitzer Prize winner, is regarded as the greatest and the most well-known
American playwright. In his later work, especially in The Iceman Cometh, a sense
of absurdity can be easily found out. Samuel Beckett ( 1906-1989), with the
publishing of Waiting for Godot, is considered to be the most influential playwright
of the Theatre of Absurd after the World War Two, winning the Nobel Prize in 1969.
Though the two literary giants belong to different ages and styles, for the former is a
master of Expressionism and Realism and the later the representative figure of the
Theatre of Absurd, their works do share certain similarities.

I . Similar Background Information

A writer's experience is unavoidably a determinative factor to his works. The
constantly mishaps happened in O'Neill life force his life view to be extremely
pessimistic. Born in a reverent Irish Catholic family, O'Neill abandoned his belief
when he found his mother was addicted to morphine. And what's worse, it was
when she gave birth to O'Neill that she was first given morphine by a quack doctor.
Since then, with a strong sense of guilty and disbelief, he fell into depravity,

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 drinking, smoking and going whoring. He married a girl secretly at the age of 21,
had to run off to Honduras because of the rejection to this marriage from both sides
of the two families, and fmally came back to America for his infection of malaria.
The marriage lasted just three years, ending with O'Neill's being accused for
adultery. The years from 1910 to 1912 were miserable to O'Neill, for he was
expelled by Princeton University and supported financially by his father to lead a
drunken life with other lowest tipplers, who were prototypes of the boozers in The
Iceman Cometh. In the year 1912, O'Neill once attempted to commit suicide for he
couldn't face such a rotten way of life any more. Although this attempt failed, he
caught pneumonia instead. This series of misfortunes shaped O'Neill's philosophy
of life into an extremity. He firmly held that "Life's a tragedy," and "we are
tragedies, the most astonishing ones among the written and unwritten tragedies."[IJ
However, after the unsuccessful suicide, O'Neill finally believed that since none of
the malaria, suicide or pneumonia could take his life away, he was determined to
live on. Ever since then, reading and play-writing became his new way of life,
though affliction and desperation never left him alone.
In the year 1939, O'Neill finished the first draft of The Iceman Cometh, from
June to November. It is the year when Germany invaded Poland, marking the start
of the Second World War. This worldly disaster struck O'Neill and drew him back
from his melancholic inner world to the crucial mad world. "The outbreak of the
European war pushed him into a deeper desperation, which has never been
recovered completely again."(2J This desperation toward the whole human race
added to what he felt for his miserable families and the slump of his career, is fully
reflected in The Iceman Cometh, in which all the characters are doing nothing but
wallow in all kinds of "pipe dreams" which they hold the only faith in. The
worldwide-spread disaster forced O'Neill to face the essentiality of human
existence and living conditions where only greed, sinfulness and fierceness
remained.
Beckett, also as a tragedian, was born in a Jewish family in Dublin, and
graduated from the Trinity College with diplomas of both French and Italian. After
he met James Joyce at Paris in 1928, because of his mastery of severa11anguages,
Beckett became the assistant of Joyce who had already been blind, and helped him
s
finish collecting the scripts of Finnegan Wake. In 1931, Beckett returned to Dublin
and started studying Descartes and Kafka, who, together with Joyce, were the most
influential figures to Beckett's works. He was constantly wandering across France,
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 Ireland, England and Germany, and was hunted by the Nazi because of his working
for Britain during the World War Two. This long-tirne life of vagrancy diminished
his sense of belonging, and formed a prototypal tramp life of his characters in
almost all his novels or dramas, such as Waiting for Godot, Murphy, Molloy and
Malone Dies. Especially after being stabbed by a stranger on January ih, 1938,
Beckett got some further understanding of the absurd human life. Joyce described
that injury in a letter to his son: "The stab was above the heart; that is uninjured,
and the lungs also, but there is a perforation of the pleura, the layer of tissue
surrounding the lungs. My house on the day after your departure was like the stock
exchange, telephone calls frorn everywhere ... Beckett has had a lucky escape." The
years of 1938 and 1939, during which time he experienced a slow recovery, were
described as "a period of apathy and lethargy" by Beckett. r3J
The world events obviously had more effect on Beckett than 0 'Neill, for the
former was a Jewish intellectual, a resistant and an Irish Red Cross worker, who
suffered a series of persecution by the Nazi. When the war ended in 1945, Beckett
returned to Paris and reached his creative culmination from that year on. However,
the trauma caused by the War continued, to lead Beckett's works to an eternal
desolation.
The life experience, as well as the worldwide devastation, pushes the writers
directly to meditate on the predicament of human existence. In their masterpieces,
The Iceman Cometh and Waiting for Godot, this meditation is well showed and·
fully represented in the therne and writing techniques.

II . Similar Theme
The Iceman Cometh tells a story of fifteen homeless dead-end boozers and three
prostitutes, who gather in Hope's saloon, with each holding one "pipe drearn" of
"tomorrow movement", are waiting for the hardware salesman Hickey's coming to
celebrate Harry Hope's birthday and to bring laughter to them as he always does
every half year. They wait for Hickey so eagerly and wish he has already finished
"figurin' out de best ~ay to save dem and bring dem peace."r41 But this time,
Hickey comes to persuade them to give up drinking besides their pipe dreams, and
go out of this "Palace of Pipe Dreams" (SJ to the outside world. Most of the boozers
manage to go out, as Hickey wishes, but all get back in the midnight, restarting a
life with drinking and pipe dreams, for they realize that what Hickey' attempt to
strip life of all rationalizations results in death. After Hickey tells them that he killed
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 his wife for ending his own pipe dream as well as hers, he is arrested by the police,
and the drama ends with nothing changes but only Hickey's arrest and the death of
Don Parritt, who sold his anarchist mother off for hatred.
In Waiting for Godot, the two acts play, two tramps-Vladimir and Estragon,
wait at a country road where only a single tree stands, keeping an appointment with
and in hope of meeting someone called Godot. During the waiting, they play games
to kill time and communicate with each other on dull subjects. In each act of the
play, the tramps encounter Pozzo, a resolute man who drags his weak and withered
slave Lucky forward with the method of a rope revolving round his neck and a whip.
Both of the two acts end up with a messenger boy informs Vladimir and Estragon
that Godot will not arrive today, but tomorrow he would certainly come. The play
ends up at where it starts, with the two tramps waiting for Godot day to day,
endlessly.
Hope, waiting, salvation and tomorrow are the same topics of the two plays in
different times. In these two works, all the characters, the boozers and tramps, are
all abandoned by the society, waiting for a savior, and insisting on the pipe dreams
or hopes that "To-morrow everything will be better."[6J O'Neill primarily named his
play as Tomorrow, and En Attendant, or in English, Waiting, was the first title
occurred in Beckett's mind. But is there a tomorrow that one can really wait for, at
least, in these two plays? The answer seems to be negative. In The Iceman Cometh,
Hickey the savior is waited by everyone zealously, then he shows up, bringing in no
salvation but death and letting the others still sink into the pipe dreams oftomorrow.
In Waiting for Godot, the expected Messiah Godot never turns up, but only sends a
boy to ensure Estragon and Vladimir that he will certainly come tomorrow, which
makes them have to wait continuously. Thus, no matter the wished men come or not
in the end, the destiny of the heroes will never be altered, that is, they can't be
saved. What both O'Neill and Beckett want to deliver is that in such an absurd
world, we can do nothing but wait-wait for the unprocurable "tomorrow" which,
though, never will arrive. Normand Berlin once said, "In The Iceman Cometh,
O'Neill faced directly to the human existence; perhaps, before him, only
Shakespeare and Sophocles, after him, only Beckett ever faced it without a
twinkle."[?] Wang Yiqun also sees the predicaments in The Iceman Cometh and
Waiting for Godot, as he believes that Iceman is a tragedy that happens when
human beings are still waiting for Godot at their last but no-way-to-run-out
minutes. [SJ
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 Waiting for Godot is ftnished in 1948, and ftrst performed in Paris on January 5th,
1953, which was a huge success. In 1956, for the ftrst time, it appeared on the
stages of New York. The Iceman Cometh, fust represented in the theater in 1946
turned out to be a big failure, as Allardyce Nicoll once criticized:

... all we may say is that his [O'Neill's] first contribution to this his latest work, The
Iceman Cometh, is a vastly disappointing play. The characters talk too much; we
become wearied with the constant repetition of the phrase "pipe dreams"; the
philosophy of the scenes is confused ... What this farrago of despairing scenes implies
no one can tell: O'Neill's latest play is perhaps his poorest. [9]

However, The Iceman Cometh revived in 1956. It is easy for one to understand the
dramatic change here. For in the year of 1946, with the triumph of the Second
World War and the witness of America's constructing hegemony in politics,
economy and military affairs, Americans were fully confident and optimistic toward
the future life. They couldn't accept the absurdity about human life showed in this
play at that time. But in 1956, the trauma left by the WWII were not dying out,
besides, the tension between America and the Soviet Union led to a fear of the
breaking out of the Third World War, which caused a sense of insecurity all over
the world. To Americans, specifically, the loss of Korean War knocked them down
to the ground, since it was the fust defeat in American military history. The
disillusionment of all the beliefs and hopes ended in a mental crisis among all
Americans. The absurd works vividly reflected the Westerners' true feelings of
absurdity and nothingness toward the post-war western society. Thus, it was
doubtless that when The Iceman Cometh, a play with absurdity and disillusionment
reappeared in the American theater, it was easily accepted by the audience then.
Besides, the success of Waiting for Godot in America should also play an important
part in the victory revival of The Iceman Cometh, since Americans could applaud at
Beckett, why could not they rethink and fall in love again with their literary icon's
predictive masterpiece?

Ill. Similar Writing Techniques

(1 )The Circular Structure
As Aristotle said, beginning, middle and end are three elements of a drama's
essential features, and it should be constructed along traditional lines, with
exposition, development, climax, resolution and denouement. However, neither The
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 Iceman Cometh nor Waiting for Godot is structured in that "rational" way: they both
end in the same conditions where they begin; what happens in the beginnings
happens exactly again in the ends. In Waiting for Godot ,in both of the two acts, the
constant troubles with shoes and hats, the at least thirty times repetition of "to wait
for Godot'', the same characters to appear, the almost same locale of a country road
and a tree (in Act II the tree's suddenly having four or five leaves marks the only
change in the locale), the exactly same conversations and actions in the end of each
play, all these circularities express a despairing situation where human beings
exhaust their meaningless lives in such endless and empty world with nothingness.
The locked circular structure, replacing the traditional linear one, shows that no
matter what happens in the process, the play is to stop at where it starts, giving a
sense of destination and cycling.
Waiting for Godot explores a static situation in which "Nothing happens, nobody
comes, nobody goes, it's awful." [!OJ The two acts of this play are cyclic; the events
of Act II largely repeat and parallel those of Act I . Waiting for Godot, therefore,
appears to be parts of an endless series, as Vladimir seems to realize when he
comments, "In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone once more, in the midest
of nothingness!" [Ill Ihab Hassan points out: "The inaction of the play is cyclical,
and its events are endlessly repetitious: its two acts are symmetric, both equal
images of an absence. Two acts, as Samuel Beckett know, are enough to represent a
sequence stretching to infinity." [121
Compared with the obvious circularity of Waiting for Godot, The Iceman Cometh
is structured in a more inconspicuous circle. This "titanic drama," [131 with nearly 20
characters and more than 4-hour length, plots a rather simply story: a crowd of
dead-end boozers, having good faith in their pipe dreams about tomorrow, are
waiting for Hickey the Savior, who turns out to be Hickey the Death, and after he
leaves, they all get back to the former conditions of dreaming. Thus, the coming of
Hickey becomes a "strange interlude" and a false climax, for the expected salvation
hasn't come about, what's worse, death enhances the desperate atmosphere. The
play, the same as Waiting for Godot, is ended at the beginning. The similar cycles
into which the two plays develop predict an irreversible but no-way-out extremity.
The circular structure in both the plays represents the living-dead condition of
human beings. Because in such circularity, there is no difference among yesterday,
today and tomorrow, just like Larry states in The Iceman Cometh, "Worst is best
here, and East is West, and tomorrow is yesterday." [141 The time in these two plays
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 reveals the meaninglessness of the modem Western life, which strongly frightens
and disappoints the modem Westerners. Time is just a patchwork of many casual
thmgs; it is useless to find out the inevitability of what's going to happen. In this
play, time, contrary to its traditional functions, cannot solve any problems, but
brings death and nihility.
(2)Symbolism
The title characters of both the two plays have the same symbolic meaning,
symbolizing the false savior. O'Neill once declared that he always tried to indicate a
deeper meaning under the title itself. [151 "Iceman" is from an American underbred
folktale, and Hickey uses it as a joke that he leaves his wife sleep with the iceman
so that he can take part in the binge at Hope's saloon. The biblical usage of
"cometh" deliberately gives an indication of the cometh of the bridegroom, or the
Lord in Matthew 25. Thus the coming of Messiah here turns out to be the coming of
Hickey, showing that Hickey is the savior-like man in the boozers' mind. Like
Willie Oban, the Harvard Law School alumnus says to all the Hickey-waiters, "Let
us ignore the Great Salesman, will soon arrive bringing the blessed bourgeois long
green! Would that Hickey or Death would come!" [1 61 Hickey is the only hope that
all the boozers hold now, and waiting for his coming means "waiting to be saved"
by him. [17]
However, Hickey is a false savior who cannot even save his own or his wife's
pipe dreams. In order to run away from the guilty of betraying his wife who
constantly forgives his betrayals, Hickey kills her and gives himself up to the police.
Here the infidelity is Hickey's not his wife's; the "iceman" turns out to be Hickey
himself. He cannot save his believers, but bring them death only. Here, the iceman,
the false Messiah, the Death are all coming into one, that is, Hickey.
In Waiting for Godot, although Godot never physically present on stage, the
41-time mentions of his name make his presence everywhere. The mystery of such
a crucial figure leads to the various guesses of the meaning of Godot. Godot is
mostly interpreted as a symbol of "God", though it might be certainly wrong to
Beckett, who apparently stated that if he had meant "God", he would have written
"God" directly. [181 But actually, there are still many indications for the readers and
critics to identify Godot with God. First of all, Godot's appearance is implied to be
similar to the appearance of God described in Bible.

Vladimir: (softly) Has he a beard, Mr. Godot?

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 Boy: Yes Sir.
Vladimir: Fair or ... (he hesitates) ... or black?
Boy: I think it's white, Sir.
Silence.
Vladimir: Christ have mercy on us! [19]

Secondly, the heartily waiting of the two tramps is the exact obedience of what
the Bible tells its believer, "Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day
your Lord is coming." [20J What's more, the play mentions that there are two boys
who separately mind goats or sheep for Godot and he treats them differently. This
can also fmd its reference in the Bible that "he [the Son of Man] will separate
people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats" [ZIJ_ Thus,
Godot is very likely described by Beckett with God's reflection, though the author
himself never admitted that.
The Iceman Cometh and Waiting for Godot both achieved huge successes in
1950's because there's a striking similarity between the plays and reality. People at
that time, buried God in response to Nietzsche's God-dead conception, and believed
in another two new "Gods"-rationality and science. The new Gods, however, also
disappointed people a lot. In the highly developed industrial world, humanity is
replaced by commercialization and capitalization; in the terrible world wars, those
"rational" countries made use of the advanced technology to produce lethal
hardware which killed hundreds of thousands of lives. The concept of God has
become meaningless. Iceman and Godot are two symbols of the false savior and no
matter whether the savior-like figures show up or not, people can only stubbornly
stick to the hopeless hope. Thus, mankind, just like the crowd of boozers or the two
tramps in the plays, is outcast in the universe and can never get the salvation.
The locales in the two plays also convey symbolic meanings. The Iceman Cometh
happens in a dark, dusty, dirty, splotched and isolated saloon whose name is
ironically "Hope". In this ''No Chance Saloon," everyone adds his meaning to this
little world, a place is said to be "the last harbor," and a place "No one here has to
worry about where they're going next, because there is no farther they can go." [221
The outside world is terrible for the crowd who cannot face the reality, and although
the inside world is just a "Palace of Pipe Dreams", it offers them a place to dream
and wonder, releasing their fears and despair provisionally, and giving them the
courage to go on living. This saloon is the concentration of the whole society, where

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 human beings are experiencing fear, lost, sorrow, desperation, numbness and
self-deception.
The locale in Waiting for Godot is dead simple: "A country road. A tree.
Evening." (Act I) ''Next day. Same time. Same place." (Act II) The whole story, if
there is a story happening at all, takes place on a terrifying empty road near a tree,
or a wasteland. It symbolizes the site of the vanished civilization where a few
survivors exist in scattered pairs. It has no direction, no location but a great
extension. The place they are at is "indescribable", says Vladimir to Pozzo, who
does not remember being here yesterday, "It's like nothing. There is nothing. There
is a tree." [23l The tree is the only landmark; there is no place to go from it. Nature
has not been restored because of the disappearance of civilization and the wasteland
represents a condition in both civilization and nature.

N. Conclusion
Though the analyses of the author's background information, the themes of both
the plays and the writing techniques O'Neill and Beckett both use, the similarities
lying in The Iceman Cometh and Waiting for Godot are easily to be found clearly. In
both plays, no matter how the events develop, the plays would always reach where
they begin. In the social reality, people find their struggle for eternal peace and
happiness is just like an endless circle. There is no way out, but only an unrealized
tomorrow and a hopeless future for people to wait, and ''waiting" itself is a painful
and futile process. What transmits from the two predictive tragedians is that,
although there is actually no exist for human society, human beings still needs a
hopeless hope or a pipe dream to comfort them and to encourage them to live on.

Notes:
[I] ~51 l!HL.'X.~: «~JB~~u1'Fi-fr)), :l~J?-: :l~J?-%\Gi!Jl±ll'i&1±, 1983 ~. ~ 2 YJ:.
[2] Lee, Robert C. "Evangelism and Anarchy in The Iceman Cometh," Modern Drama. No. 2,
September, 1969, 2.
[3] Cohn, Ruby. Ed. Samuel Beckett. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc.; 1975, ix.
[4] O'Neill, Eugene. The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O'Neil/: Complete Plays. New York:
Literary Classics of the United States, 1988, 606.
[5] Ibid., 611.
[6] Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot, New York: Grove Press, 1954, 35.
[7J~iJ/ §t£5(~: {(~JB~~IJf'Fi'fr)), :j~J?-: ~~J?-)!;\GJ!Ijl±\J'i&li, 1983 ~' ~ 41 JA.
[8] Ibid., 41.

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 [9] Nicoll, Allardyce. "Eugene O'Neill," in World Drama: From Aeschylus to Anouilh.
Harcourt: Brace & World, Inc., 1950, 880-93.
[1 0] Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot, New York: Grove Press, 1954, 28.
[11] Ibid., 52.
[12]~91 §t>}.liJi:j;:, %:-=ftlf: «~~~-#1:.$~~». «PiliEJ!R~tt*~~~fR», 2007
$~1M, ~431/i.
[13] Birlin, Normand. Eugene 0 'Neill. London: Macmillan, 1982, 142.
[14). O'Neill, Eugene. The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O'Neill: Complete Plays. New York: Litemry
Classics of the United States, 1988, 589.
[15] Barlow, Judith. Final Acts-The Creation of Three Late O'Neill Plays. New Haven: Yale
UP, 1985, 86.
[16] O'Neill, Eugene. The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O'Neill: Complete Plays. New York:
Literary Classics of the United States, 1988, 586.
[17] Ibid., 606.
[18J %:!l!I: «J~t~~mu~J • .Ll1ii: .Li1iii:¥xl±lllOC*±, 1980 if:, m 231/i.
[19] Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot, New York: Grove Press, 1954, 103.
[20] Matthew 24:42, Holy Bible, NRSV.
[21] Matthew 25:33, Holy Bible, NRSV.
[22] O'Neill, Eugene. The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O'Neill: Complete Plays. New York:
Literary Classics of the United States, 1988, 577-8.
[23] Beckett, SamueL Waiting for Godot, New York: Grove Press, 1954, 56.

Shu Hong, Program Coordinator of American Studies Center at Sichuan

University, a National Research Base granted by Ministry of Education.
Graduated as an English literature major from College of Foreign Languages
and Cultures, SCU, she specializes in American Literature and Culture. She
has published several articles on various journals, like The Writer Magazine,
International Conference, etc ..

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