Open Prompt 2

1984. Select a line or so of poetry, or a moment or scene in a novel, epic poem, or play that you find especially memorable. Write an essay in which you identify the line or the passage, explain its relationship to the work in which it is found, and analyze the reasons for its effectiveness.

"Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly," Jerry rattled out insightfully, amid twisting and rapidly changing trains of thought. While roughly inserted into the chatter of a often seemingly senseless character, this quote from Edward Albee's "The Zoo Story" manages to collect within it one of the main messages of the play with expert use of juxtaposition and parable.

The idea of a long journey that brings with its end only a return to the beginning point is one of the main messages of the play, and ushers in the glum, futile air that follows Jerry through the oblivious world around him. It suggests that some struggles will bring great pain and the reward would only be in the form of a swift delivery back. Jerry, one of the two characters directly included in the play, suffers constantly from this overhanging meaning. His lack of communication and relation skills render him distant from other humans, struggling to find some way to connect to others. Throughout the play and his conversation with Peter, one can slowly come to understand just how broken this has made him. He has no faith in love, no faith in good or bad, only in compromise and empathy. The distance he has travelled has been immense and painful and the play illustrates his experiences after returning to where he started, armed with new knowledge of the new, enlightened world. The people around him, however, have yet to learn.

Peter is exactly the opposite of Jerry, and this juxtaposition, as well as specific contradictions in conversation, emphasize what Jerry has learned and how it his knowledge sets him apart. While Jerry is eccentric, thoughtful and sharp-tongued, defying social standards, Peter is everything that a middle-class man is expected to be; slow, quiet, and scared of deep thought. He sits down at the same bench every weekend and reads. Jerry is all movement; he paces, flails his arms, and overall comes off as animated and lively. Jerry is thought and insight; Peter is trained content and placidness. An overflow of thought versus a lack of thought. In a way, the story explaining the quote forces Peter to confront this opposite world. Suddenly he's scared, because he's never lived in a world like that before. The public is too foolish to understand that journeys don't always end in great joy and success.

The parable of Jerry and the Dog is the defining point of the play, and it finally puts into perspective the real meaning of the quote. In the end, after all of his hard work and hopes, Jerry has gained nothing but questions about the very things people are raised to believe in. Love, hate and peace are all brought into question. Suddenly, working very hard might only bring a bitter stalemate, empathy on both sides. But in that brings cruel but crucial insight, knowledge that brings true understanding; despite how terrible the consequences. Jerry, in learning, attempts only to pass on his knowledge before taking his own life.

Each character in "The Zoo Story" is forced to grow, forced to go through great trials to gain knowledge that perhaps they always should have known. None of the characters come out the same. Through skilled use of contrasting characters and parable, Edward Albee expresses the importance of Jerry's message and leaves it to grow in the minds of his readers.