In Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh the characters in the play are broken human beings who live their lives through illusions – “pipe dreams”. They foolishly translate their memories into hopes for a future that will never exist and as the play opens, they are content in their own world of denial. Hickey, an old comrade enters and seems to shatter this happy spirit of drunken illusion as, he has reformed. Hickey, no longer needs the comfort and solace found in whiskey because he has finally killed the pipe dream that has ruled his life and has now found peace. He has purged himself of illusions and knows the full truth of himself. In Act IV, Hickey goes into a long recital of the events of his life. How he became a salesman and married Evelyn, who always forgave him his drunken behaviors. Hickey finally realizes that the only way out for him was to kill Evelyn so he would be free of her pipe dream about his someday changing and becoming a respectable man. He has hence freed himself from illusion by committing a crime that will sit him in the electric chair. The only reason that he is no longer carrying with him a “pipe dream” like the rest of the characters is because he has resigned from life and is already dead in spirit. To truly free himself of all of his illusions, Hickey knows that he must tell the others about the murder. It represents a way to purge his emotions and for once, admit to what he has done. Living a life of denial has meant creating an existence where everything was merely a lie. Longing for normalcy, he recounts his actions because he knows the end is near and he wants to die with a peaceful conscience. His pipe dream haunts him all of his life and he kills it, but in the end, it is this same pipe dream that leads to his death, both literal and figurative. With it, he is an unhappy man, without it, he is nothing. ...
