Eugene the Iceman: Undermining the Myth of Fertility and the Modernization of the Traditional Through the Infusion of Novelistic Discourse in O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh

This article seeks to analyse Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh as an illustrator of the hopeless hope for a better tomorrow; whether textually or dramatically and as a modern work of drama, O’Neil’s magnum opus projects his will to undermine and topple down the traditional assembly of thought and perspectives in order to approach modernization. Utilizing archetypal instances and the Bakhtinian indicators of dialogism, such as polyphony and carnivalesque, the article at hand addresses in The Iceman Cometh, O’Neil’s deflation of the archetypal fertility myths through the reciprocal, dialectical relation of the infusion of novelistic discourse and the meta-theatricality of the play, both of which significant in the construction of a cosmopolitan, modern piece of drama. The archetype of peace, of resurrection, has no power in O'Neill's myth, where the ego-less men exist though their empty “pipe-dreams,” a self-constructed form of truth in a polyphonic world of several, fragmentary yet autonomous, modernized images.

کلیدواژه ها:

modernization ، the traditional myth of fertility ، novelistic discourse ، meta-theatricality