The emotional center of the play perhaps evolves less from its words than from its silence. Such sounds as are heard in the hotel lobby—garbage cans, an El train, a fire engine and the like—accentuate the macabre stillness of a city in the early morning hours. The silence is a threatening force, an abnormal “spell” that “presses suffocatingly upon the street, enters the deserted, dirty lobby.” (31) To the Clerk, the night seems like death, (30) and his mind “cowers” from it. Such hope as there is exists in the sounds that are the night’s “obsequies”: “Only so many El trains pass in one night, and each one passing leaves one less to pass, so the night recedes, too, until at last it must die and join all the other long nights in Nirvana, the Big Night of Nights. And that’s life.” (19) In the acted play, the Clerk’s silence is to Erie like the silence of the city. The actor who plays Hughes must play but not speak the interior monologue. Only a few words rise to the surface; to Erie, he must seem another manifestation of death, like the threat outside, like Room 492 to which he cannot bear to return. Yet Hughes’s silence is turning with a little life, born of vague hostilities, of physical pain in his feet, of boredom with overfriendly, anonymous hotel guests. Draped over the desk, he resembles a wax-works figure, but his mind pursues the sounds he hears in destructive fantasies of waking “the whole damned city” (17) with the garbage cans or of burning it down. It is only when an abnormally long pause of silence falls that he is forced out from the fantasies to hear the night sound nearest him, the voice of Erie Smith: “His mind has been trying to fasten itself to some noise in the night, but a rare and threatening pause of silence has fallen on the city, and here he is, chained behind a hotel desk forever, awake when everyone else in the world is asleep, except Room 492, and he won’t go to bed, he’s still talking, and there is no escape.” (29)

Erie pours words into the silence, words that spatter and drain away unheard. They are a bragging, wise-cracking lament that centers on his loss of his dead friend, the former Night Clerk, Hughie. In the streets there lies a physical threat—of a beating from the men from whom he borrowed money to buy flowers for Hughie’s funeral, and whom he cannot pay back. But the real threat is not physical: “I wouldn’t never worry about owing guys, like I owe them guys. I’d always know I’d make a win that’d fix it. But now I got a lousy hunch when I lost Hughie I lost my luck—I mean, I’ve lost the old confidence. He used to give me confidence.” (35)

For “confidence,” read “life.” Without Hughie, Erie falls in a void that is like death. He cannot bring himself to enter the cage of the elevator and ascend to Room 492. Instead he stands twirling his room key,** “frantically as if it were a fetish which might set him free.” (28) To leave the light of the lobby, to go through the door for which he has the key is to die, much as Deborah, Con and the bums die by going through such a door. Erie clings to the key as if it were the substance of his life, as if life itself were somehow a key to death. Buying the hundred-dollar floral piece for Hughie’s funeral to give him a “big-time send-off” has been the fulfilling act of his life. Accepting this, he also accepts that life holds nothing more for him, that he would be better off like Hughie, out of the racket his life has been. His mask has worn thin, and the darkness beneath shows through. At this point, he turns, defeated, and prepares to ascend to his room.

Yet his words have made contact, and in the play’s final moments, the Night Clerk accepts the rules of Erie’s game as Hughie had done. To Erie, the moment of realization that in the night he has touched another life is a “saving revelation”; (35) to Hughes it is even more: “Beatific vision swoons on the empty pools of the Night Clerk’s eyes. He resembles a holy saint, recently elected to Paradise.” (32) The vision of beatitude, a saint’s vision, is no more than a pipe-dream, but it is enough. What is perhaps unclear in The Iceman Cometh is explicit here, that man’s only sense of life comes through sharing a vision with another human being. The vision has no truth; it contains no hope. Yet it offers movement, and it is the focus of existence. It is a far remove from the dreams of Robert Mayo or of Juan Ponce de Leon, who saw, or sought to see, God in their visions. No such matter animates Erie and the Night Clerk or those living in Harry Hope’s back room. The pipe-dream is only the way to sustain life; yet to dream is to endure.

The complex social imagery and the full psychological elaboration of the cycle held O’Neill’s interest through the beginning of 1939. In that year, all solitudes were invaded, all walls broken. By June, the cycle was unofficially shelved, and O’Neill had turned to writing about the lives of the down-and-outs in The Iceman Cometh and Hughie, as if, by retreating into the debris of humanity, he might find shelter from names like Munich, Czechoslovakia and Poland. The dreams that in the cycle led a man toward action, out and into open warfare with his world, now changed, lost their power and became a form of memory as man turned weakly toward past illusions and huddled from the world. In bomb shelters, men do not behave very differently, perhaps, from the way they behave in The Iceman Cometh.