• Divyansh Vyas

This is a paper on one of the most revered plays of Edward Albee, The Zoo Story. The play has been important for many years now precisely because Albee questions the most consistent act of everyday life in any culture up to the present moment: of unquestionably adopting metanarratives or ideological-fictional patterns to define our roles and lives, regardless of them being in dissonance with our personal desires or preferences. However, this betrayal against one’s self is not without reason. The advent of the second half of the twentieth century brings with itself a new factor: the postmodern condition. The fragmentation of all metanarratives took away the sense of total assurance with which people functioned in life and they were confronted with the postmodern condition of not having any unquestionable grounds of meaning and knowledge. This led to the disturbing feeling of perpetual existential uncertainty in everyday life since not a lot could be known for sure anymore. The paper explores how Peter, the main character of the play, forcefully forgets about the postmodern uncertainty to live his everyday life on the basis of the metanarrative of the American Dream, so he could live his life with ease of feeling complete certainty about his experience. The paper represents how Peter lives inauthentically because of having no desire to live according to the structures he adopts and how those structures of everyday life become repressive and suffocating for him as they confine his identity within the heteronormative institutional life of the US during the long 1960s. Peter exemplifies the typical white, upper-middle class, suburban male of the day. Peter is confronted by Jerry, someone who lives authentically based on the tenets of the Beat Generation which advocate for self-fashioning as per one’s preferences. Jerry lives freely and as per his will, even though it pushes him on the margins of the American society as a poor gay man. Jerry forces Peter to confront his passive state and unlived life by forcing him to remember the reality of the postmodern uncertainty. Both men in the play are very different from one another yet they both find themselves alienated individually and from the rest of society as well. Albee shows how the repressive conditions of the time, along with the general passivity of the American public in terms of fighting for change for a better and more inclusive society, created a crisis of masculinity for people. Albee illustrates how this crisis haunts people, regardless of whether they conform like Peter or live in irreverence like Jerry, that leads to terrible consequences in the form of violence, rage, alienation, social death and ultimately, even suicide.

postmodernism, metanarrative, fictional pattern, forced forgetfulness, memory

"Confronting Inauthentic Living in The Zoo Story", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.12, Issue 2, page no.e553-e576, February-2025, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2502465.pdf

"Confronting Inauthentic Living in The Zoo Story", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.12, Issue 2, page no. ppe553-e576, February-2025, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2502465.pdf