Jerry's Purpose in The Zoo Story

In the play The Zoo Story by Edward Albee, Jerry aims to make Peter conscious of how contemporary social order affects people’s lives and prompts some to feel false security. From the beginning to the end, Jerry tells Peter about everything related to his life and everything bothering him. He also insists on learning about Peter’s life. When their lives are compared, it becomes obvious how different they are, and it is understood through Peter’s reactions while hearing about Jerry’s life that Peter is not familiar with the lives of people like Jerry. Jerry repeatedly implies Peter has a brighter and more pleasing life than him, for example, when he talks about where he lives and what he has in his house (Albee 393–394). Until he starts to tell the dog story, Jerry slightly tries to make Peter aware of how he does not know about the people out of his class. According to his story and his notion, the dog and Jerry could not make peace because they focused and relied on their parts until Jerry poisoned the dog after days of feeding him, which was an act of love on Jerry’s part. That is, for Jerry, feeding the dog was an act of love and the dog attacking him was an act of hatred, and there were uneven emotions between them; they did not understand each other. After Jerry poisoned the dog, they developed a silent communication that was provided by the combination of love and hate. When this is adapted to the situation between the people in America, it can be seen that the people who live in good conditions like Peter are not aware of, or do not understand, people who live in bad conditions like Jerry. The two sides cannot achieve good communication that can solve problems and provide peaceful lives because people like Peter live in a secure area with their properties and perfect families and are "vegetables" from Jerry’s perspective. Jerry wants Peter to be an "animal". From his story, he wants to show him how to be an animal like the dog and establish communication with people like him, or at least make him think about his indifference towards them. So, he forces him to commit a crime, to make him lose something and wake him up from his dream-like life. He starts an argument by claiming the bench they are sitting on as his own. Having had the bench to himself for a long time, Peter also claims it as his own, which creates conflict between them. The bench, in some sense, represents every good thing in Peter’s life, which he takes for granted because he has had it for years and does not care that other people have the right to have those things as well. At the end, when Peter kills Jerry, he loses the bank because the bank is not the safe and peaceful place that belonged to him for all his life, and now Peter is aware of dangers in life that did not threaten his life until then but affected everyone like Jerry. Jerry made Peter conscious of real life, his own non-secure life, with his actions and words, and Peter is not going to forget that because it will be on TV and in the newspaper as well as in his memory.