Alienation and Understanding Theme Analysis

The Zoo Story is one long conversation between Peter, a middle-class and mild-mannered publishing executive reading on a park bench, and Jerry, a poor and unconventional man who approaches him. As Peter and Jerry discuss family life, Jerry’s troubled relationship with a dog, and a mysterious event at the zoo, they struggle to communicate. Even when they try to bridge the gaps between their different life experiences, they often misunderstand or offend each other. Towards the end of the play, Jerry antagonizes Peter to the point of violence, causing a fight in which the men reveal their true natures to each other—and thus begin to understand each other better. However, rather than bringing Peter and Jerry closer, their sense of mutual understanding makes their relationship even more fraught (and ultimately deadly). In demonstrating the ways that close contact further estranges the two protagonists, The Zoo Story suggests that mutual understanding, far from lessening a person’s isolation, can often be the cause of it.

Initially, Jerry and Peter are able to carry on a friendly conversation, in spite (or perhaps because) of the fact that they often struggle to understand each other. Peter is “bewildered by the seeming lack of communication” he at first feels with Jerry, but he continues to engage as if “by reflex.” In other words, the norms of polite society require Peter to continue speaking to Jerry despite the awkwardness between them, and, ironically, their friendship seems most natural during this phase of the play, when it is based on a code of manners rather than on any sort of emotional or intellectual bond. In fact, the more Jerry reveals about himself, the less comfortable with him Peter becomes. For example, Peter is cheerful to think that the unusual Jerry lives in the Village (a neighborhood Peter views as fittingly eccentric), and he “pouts” when he learns that Jerry actually lives on the Upper West Side. Peter seems to prefer to view Jerry according to his own assumptions about him, growing more distant the more he learns about his new acquaintance. The reverse is also true: every time Jerry arrives at an accurate insight about Peter’s life, Peter becomes “irksome” and “annoyed.” When Jerry guesses that Peter wanted sons but will never have any, Peter shuts down, asking “how would you know about that?” and telling Jerry, “that’s none of your business!” Peter is thus suggesting that his personal histories and private feelings are not Jerry’s to know—and that Jerry’s attempts to understand Peter will put a stop to their mutual friendliness.

Jerry’s relationship with the landlady’s dog also demonstrates that mutual understanding can sometimes cause estrangement rather than intimacy.  At the beginning of Jerry’s story, he and the dog have a close—if tense—relationship: the dog continues to attack Jerry, and Jerry responds first by trying to feed the beast and then by trying to poison him. Yet even though they antagonize each other, Jerry comes to see the dog as his “friend,” telling Peter that “I loved the dog now, and I wanted the dog to love me.” To Jerry, fighting with the dog is a kind of connection, because they devote time and thought to each other. However, once Jerry and the dog “make contact,” looking at each other closely and beginning to understand each other’s motivations, they cease to share any sort of relationship. “We feign indifference,” Jerry explains, “we walk past each other safely; we have an understanding. It’s very sad, but you’ll have to admit that it is an understanding.” Here, connecting with and reaching an “understanding” with the dog immediately separates Jerry from his one-time animal “friend,” demonstrating that understanding can directly cause alienation.

Ultimately, this same pattern—in which understanding divides people from each other instead of bringing them closer together—characterizes Peter and Jerry’s relationship. As it was with the landlady’s dog, Jerry’s stated goal with Peter is “to get to know somebody, know all about him”; similarly, Jerry wants Peter to “understand” him, insisting that he has “tried to explain” himself “slowly” and in detail. Yet rather than growing closer over the course of the play, the two men become more afraid of and disgusted by each other. By the play’s final scene, Peter and Jerry do (to some extent) “make contact” with each other. They engage physically, fighting with each other over the park bench that Peter has been sitting on, and in the course of this they even start to speak many of the same phrases, telling the same jokes and making the same prayers. However, this newfound connection is the direct cause of the climactic violence, which leaves Peter traumatized and Jerry dead. Rather than connecting the men, this new understanding has destroyed both of them.

Tellingly, Jerry uses many of his final breaths to shoo Peter away: “you’d better go now,” he says, “hurry away, Peter.” At the beginning of the play, Jerry wanted Peter to stay and talk to him, but now he wants Peter to leave. Just like with the landlady’s dog, Peter and Jerry’s understanding of each other forces them to—quite literally—leave each other alone. This understanding also alienates them from the other people in their lives, as Peter presumably must live alone with the secret of what has happened to Jerry and Jerry, now dead, can no longer form any new relationships. In The Zoo Story, then, Albee reverses common tropes about understanding and human connection, suggesting that “contact” breeds not closeness but loneliness.