Summary&Analysis

Now, in order to look into the peculiarities of Edward Albee`s artistic method, the way the story is developed, it would be necessary to follow through with an analysis of each of the play`s happenings, in an orderly fashion.
Albee`s play opens up with a buttoned-up man named Peter, sitting on a bench in Central Park, legs crossed, smoking a pipe and reading a large hardback book. It’s a beautiful Sunday afternoon, as birds’ chirps confirm. Into the patch of park roams a wandering oddball named Jerry, who, standing behind Peter, announces creepily, “I’ve been to the zoo.”
Jerry doesn’t so much talk with Peter as accost him, poking and prodding at the man’s life as a husband, father, and executive, making uncomfortable, eerily direct questions—“Do you mind if we talk?” he asks, well after they’ve begun. Jerry’s queer manner of communicating and Peter’s curiosity slowly stirring up makes the audience suspect that something is going to happen, that this is not simple occasional chitchat between strangers, that this is potentially something of substance. Though the play has just begun, Peter has already reached the turning point of his life, though he doesn’t know it yet.
Jerry strives to start a full-fledged conversation which results in his monologue as Peter’s replies are devoid of meaning and only result from his politeness. Jerry builds up tension, first scattering myriads of questions on Peter’s private life over him, then making somewhat rude but accurate suppositions and, failing to capture Peter’s interest, begins telling stories about himself. The tales are the kind you’re not sure you want to hear—there’s an always-weeping neighbor; two empty picture frames back in his bedroom; his extreme relationship with a neighbor’s dog—though you sense the stories’ significance in defining this man’s existence. So you listen. “The Story of Jerry and the Dog” is announced by Jerry in a “reading-from-a-billboard” voice, which marks the importance of what we are going to hear. Moreover, the story is framed by mysterious phrases that sound like philosophical maxims – for example, “sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly”(quite an accurate description of the process of symbolism – and of the Absurdist manner of writing). Before actually dwelling on his relationship with the dog, Jerry describes the character of its owner, the landlady. She is so closely identified with the dog that it must be accepted that Albee intends them to be interchangeable, as symbols. For the dog, which is as hideous as its mistress, has a permanent erection which parallels the woman’s sexual desire. It is also described as “making sounds in his throat like a woman,” while the landlady has eyes which “looked like the dog’s eyes.” Both the dog and its mistress attack Jerry in the entrance to the building, a Freudian image, one could suspect. The smothering of “the animal within” is also a classical Freudian concept, with easily recognizable, see-through imagery. Jerry’s response to these attacks is the same in both cases. He repulses them. He sees both the dog and the landlady as a threat to himself as an invasion of the isolation which he has come to accept as the norm of human existence. He offers the animal food in an attempt to secure immunity from contact, and when this fails he attempts to kill it. Although the dog survives the poisoned food, it no longer attempts to make contact, but lapses into an indifference which, as Albee suggests, is equally a mark of human relationships. It is at this moment that Jerry suddenly reaches the understanding which sends him out in search of someone to whom he can pass on his insight. Jerry recognizes that the dog’s violence had indeed been an attempt to make contact, and that, as such, it was an act of love: "We neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach other… was the dog’s attempt to bite me not an act of love? If we can so misunderstand, well then, why have we invented the word love in the first place?" It is this message of the need for love in a world that places its faith purely in appearances which Jerry carries with him to the park where he meets Peter, this is the sensation that dawned upon him at the zoo; and it is, in effect, the ritual of Jerry and the dog that is now acted out on the stage. Peter now plays the role which Jerry had played in the rooming-house, while Jerry plays the role of the dog. So, too, Peter responds to Jerry’s intrusion firstly by kindly condescension, by “being patronizing” in reacting out of adopted politeness as Jerry had in offering the dog hamburger meat, and then finally by violence, as Jerry had in attempting to kill the animal.
Love, human contact, is an art which has to be learned. One has to begin with simple things, as Jerry states later on in the play, rather prophetically, carrying the truth from the depths - de profundis! There certainly are some reasons to consider the character of Jerry as a symbol for the Savior Himself (hence the similarity of names), experiencing atonement, receiving death from the hand of his subject whom he had blessed with the ultimate truth. «It’s just that if you can’t deal with people you have to make a start somewhere. WITH ANIMALS! … A person has to have some way of dealing with SOMETHING. If not with people …SOMETHING. With a bed, with a cockroach… with pornographic playing cards, with a strongbox…."
Peter’s response to the parable is that of a man who can no longer find arguments, but who still wants to cling desperately to his creed. Peter shouts out "I DON‘T WANT TO HEAR ANY MORE" and gets up to leave. This parody of contact stimulates a momentary understanding on Peter’s part of the nexus which Jerry has been trying to establish between the zoo and the nature of contemporary life. Jerry then adopts the same strategy which the dog had used - "kindness and cruelty combined ...» The kindness done with and abandoned, he announces that it’s feeding time in the lions` cage and provokes Peter into a defense of his bench-- a mock battle in which he is seen absurdly defending the privacy and property rights which are clearly the basis of his values. That`s where the story reaches its culmination, taking a somewhat unexpected turn. But Jerry is determined that this violence will not lead to the casual indifference which had been the result of his encounter with the dog. Accordingly he throws a knife to Peter and then impales himself on it. The "middle-class" Everyman, then, has finally been released from the solitude which he had taken as a necessary and even desirable aspect of the human condition. As Jerry insists, he has been "dispossessed." Peter, at the end of the play, has been liberated from his false assumptions and is finally purged of his illusions. Never again, as Jerry insists, will he be able to retreat into solipsism; never again will he be able to repeat the frantic cry of the alienated and the disengaged, “leave me alone.”