THE OPPOSING FORCES IN ALBEE'S 'THE ZOO STORY"

Referring to The Zoo Story in particular, this offensive is represented by the clash in the personalities, the setting, the actions and the dialogue of the two characters, Peter, the protagonist, and Jerry, the antagonist. There is a double reality in The Zoo Story, embodied by Peter, who stands for everything related to American optimism complacency, conformity, bour— geoisie, "the old pigeonhole bit" order, categorizing people according to where they live and to what they do versus Jerry, a representative of the other side of reality, of a world in which everyone is "a permanent transient" . By producing a clash between these two characters, Albee's personal vision of the world in The Zoo Story becomes "an image of the difficulty 4 of communication between human beings in our world" , and it