Iceman Cometh, The

Iceman Cometh, The, play by Eugene O'Neill, produced and published in 1946.

Harry Hope's run‐down New York saloon and rooming house harbors a group of alcoholics, among them Hope himself, a former Tammany man; Willie Oban, a Harvard Law School graduate; “Jimmy Tomorrow,” a onetime newspaper correspondent; and Larry Slade and Don Parritt, former anarchists. All are guilt‐ridden by their ruined lives and all cling to “pipe dreams” about their condition and the future. They eagerly await a visit from Hickey, a cheerful salesman they consider one of them, though he is outwardly more successful. Upon his arrival to give his annual party, however, the pattern changes because Hickey's traditional joke about his wife and the iceman is not forthcoming, and he threatens the men's pipe dreams with talk of bringing to others the peace he claims to have found through having given up drink and discarded all illusions. Larry sees that Hickey's view that one should “sink down to the bottom of the sea” is poisonous, for “the lie of the pipe dream is what gives life” to people like themselves. In their deprivation they turn to hard, humorless cynicism, Hickey most of all in confessing he killed his wife out of hatred, not to give her peace; Parritt admits he betrayed his mother and anarchism out of hatred. Both in effect commit suicide: Hickey by summoning the police, Parritt by leaping from the fire escape. The idea that Hickey is insane slowly develops as a new pipe dream, allowing the others to resume their old relationships, banter, and illusions, and only Larry, who perceives Hickey as the “Iceman of Death,” remains truly and despairingly aware of reality.