Abstract
Confronting pipe dreams—flaws and delusions in our self-narratives—has been central to American tragedy at least since the plays of Eugene O’Neill. In The Iceman Cometh, O’Neill presents four separate ways in which people deal with this confrontation: Harry Hope, Hickey, Larry Slade, and Don Parritt. Characters who resemble Slade and Parritt in their confrontations with a collapsing self also are depicted by Arthur Miller as models of tragedy in many of his plays. To these two models, Miller adds a third: one based on characters’ indignation in the face of challenges to their self-narratives. For both O’Neill and Miller, despite their differences, confrontations with delusions about personal responsibility are central to tragedy. As Miller suggests in many of his plays, the most difficult challenge may be the struggle to forgive ourselves. That struggle for self-forgiveness, so central for O’Neill and Miller, becomes a major theme for later American dramatists.
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Palmer, D. (2020). Pipe Dreams and the Self: Eugene O’Neill’s and Arthur Miller’s Conceptions of Tragedy. In: Marino, S., Palmer, D. (eds) Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37293-4_3
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