ANALYSIS OF JOE MOTT'S PIPE DREAM IN ICEMAN COMETH

Analysis of Joe Mott's pipe dream in Iceman Cometh

Joe Mott's Pipe Dream

Based mainly on Joe Smith, a gambler O'Neill distributed rooms with at Jimmy-the-Priest's, Joe Mott is very dark, a failed gambler, and, alike to Jim Harris in All God's Chillun Got Wings, a casualty of the yearn to be acknowledged as “white.” In seeking to arrange funding for his wagering dwelling, he self-identifies with the white man who is fronting him the money: “So I undoes, and he finds out I'se white, certain 'nuff, 'cause I run broad open for years and buys my sugar on de spot, and de cops and I is friends” (590). To Joe Mott, money is the large equalizer, the identification to acceptance in the United States, the signifier of worthiness. In this realization, he is not different Brutus Jones. Joe Smith, on the other hand, was less thriving in his pursuits. Apparently, O'Neill sustained Smith financially for some time, payments Smith mentioned to as his “royalties” (Gelbs 656). O'Neill's supplementing of Smith's little retirement benefit is one sign of the playwright's anxiety for very dark people. And Joe Mott, different Jim Harris, at smallest is cognizant that his“pipe dream”-existing as a thriving white businessman—is a racist nightmare from which he is despairing to aroused .

According to Kurt Eisen, Mott's realization lies at the very heart of the play's intentions. Therefore his occurrence as the sole very dark feature inhabiting the bar is especially disclosing and makes him more really agent of humanity's widespread predicament—unsatisfied pipe dreams that lead alienated spirits only to death—than any of O'Neill's other very dark characters. He is, in a sense, a universalizing agency, and in being so, he embodies a nobility that expresses, on identical periods with the white individual characteristics ...