Logic vs. Faith Theme Analysis

Peter is a rational textbook publisher who spends every Sunday not at church but reading on a bench in the park. He views the world as orderly and rational, and he seems to have no use for inexplicable things like spirituality. By contrast, Jerry behaves erratically, asks unanswerable questions that unnerve Peter, and brings up God and faith at several key moments in the play, gesturing to his belief that the world cannot be rationally understood. As the men’s interaction progresses, Peter’s rational and secular view of the world comes to seem more and more naïve, since he’s unable to account for the emotional, irrational lives of human beings. But the play doesn’t give a clear alternative to secular rationality: Jerry’s faith is shown to be idiosyncratic and contradictory, and it may have nothing to do with a higher power at all. Nonetheless, as the play closes, both characters cry out “oh, my god” in the face of violence that they cannot understand. This suggests that faith—while inexplicable in itself—is sometimes necessary to make meaning from illogical life.

The play has a fairly clear attitude towards Peter’s secular rationality: it’s a shallow worldview that’s incapable of explaining the mystery and complexity of life. In particular, Peter seems incapable of understanding the complexity within people, which he displays most clearly during Jerry’s story about his landlady, a complicated and flawed person who drinks too much, makes sexual advances, and loves her mean dog. Peter’s reaction is essentially denial; he says he “finds it hard to believe that people such as that” actually exist outside of fiction. In this way, Peter seems to be hiding from reality by embracing secular modernity; he publishes textbooks that impose false order on the world, reads fiction about flawed people instead of actually meeting them, and, when confronted with something he can’t understand, he resorts to denial. Peter seems fragile and sheltered, his secular rationality a way of protecting him from his greatest fear: that the world is too complicated to understand.

Jerry, on the other hand, knows intuitively that life is complicated and illogical, which is reflected in his contradictory and idiosyncratic relationship to religion. For instance, when his landlady asked him to pray for her sick dog, he wanted to say that he didn’t know how to pray, but also that he was too busy praying for all the people in his rooming house to pray for the dog. It seems that he can’t decide whether he’s not religious at all or whether he’s zealously and obsessively religious. This is shown again in the final moments of the play, when the dying Jerry calls out to God with a “combination of scornful mockery and supplication.” So it’s clear that Jerry doesn’t have a logical or straightforward relationship to religion, which is perhaps fitting, since his faith seems about as senseless and illogical as human life itself. 

It’s also not clear whether Jerry is actually referring to a higher power when he invokes God. During an emotional monologue, Jerry reveals his belief that God “turned his back on the [world] some time ago,” yet he describes God as “A COLOURED QUEEN WHO WEARS A KIMONO AND PLUCKS HIS EYEBROWS” and “A WOMAN WHO CRIES WITH DETERMINATION BEHIND HER CLOSED DOOR.” These descriptions specifically refer to fellow tenants of Jerry’s rooming house, which perhaps subtly clarifies his faith: if God has abandoned the world, then perhaps he finds the divine in other people—particularly in flawed, suffering people like those in his rooming house. In this way, Jerry’s obsession with connecting with another person (specifically, Peter) can be seen as a religious quest, albeit a doomed one, since Jerry is tormented by his belief that he can never truly connect with anyone at all.

Despite the play’s confusing and contradictory depictions of Jerry’s faith, Albee makes clear that faith is at the heart of a person’s experience of the world. This is apparent in the way both characters invoke God at their most emotional and vulnerable moments. First, when Jerry is finishing the story about the dog, he becomes so emotional that he starts to blubber, explaining that if a person fails to connect with other people, they have to “make a start” somewhere else—with animals, he says, before listing various nonsensical items and then concluding, “with God.” This suggests that God brings Jerry comfort and meaning amid his isolating and difficult life. And Peter, too, seems to turn to God for meaning in a moment of uncontrollable emotion. After Jerry impales himself with the knife, Peter begins to cry out “oh, my god.” Faced with real crisis for perhaps the first time in his life, Peter loses the ability to make meaning except by calling out to God—a being in which, moments ago, he ostensibly did not believe. And while Peter is crying out to God, a dying Jerry does, too. Even if Jerry was never quite sure what he believed, God is still important enough to be the subject of his final words.

“God” is also the final word of the play, lingering in the air as the lights come up. In ending this way, Albee suggests that the answers of the secular, modern world—the science Peter reads about in Time Magazine and the history he publishes in his textbooks—are not enough to make sense of irrational, intense human relationships and feelings. Faith, then, remains a necessary source of meaning, not only for the erratic Jerrys of the world but for the seemingly logical Peters, too.