The Bucket Symbol Analysis

The hanging bucket symbolizes the main characters’ unsustainable shared tendency to project their anxieties, ambitions, and personalities onto external objects rather than reflecting internally or communicating with one another. With its incessant, maddening sound of dripping water, the bucket reminds the room’s inhabitants of the passing of time and the ever-unresolved tension and malaise that grows between them. Aston hangs the bucket from the ceiling to catch that water that drips through the cracks in the roof. Instead of actually fixing the problem and tarring over the leaks in the ceiling, Aston pushes the problem down the road, offering a deferral of the problem in place of a solution. Likewise, their discussions about the bucket are themselves ways of deferring any genuinely productive communication, such as when Davies asks what they’ll do when the bucket is full, to which Aston responds that they’ll empty it, or when Mick questions Aston about whether emptying the bucket will really “do it.” In this way, the bucket serves as a vessel for the characters’ problems and anxieties, putting them aside and out of sight, but never completely out of mind.

Water drips into the bucket periodically throughout the entirety of the play, and all three men fixate on this at some point. The reader, too, is drawn to the bucket when either the dialogue or the stage directions draw their attention to the sound of dripping water. Thus, the persistent presence of the bucket serves as a reminder that the unresolved tensions and general malaise of the characters will not subside until real changes occur.