Eugene O'Neil's The Iceman Cometh may possess certain characteristics that occasionally portray a sense of hope, but overall, it is a play that exudes despair and desperation. The Iceman Cometh opens with a mood of tentative hope in anticipation of the arrival of Hickey, an old and dear friend of the bar patrons, but that mood quickly shifts to one of confusion and despair when Hickey reveals an unexpected change in character. Specific characters and events throughout the course of the play may convey hope temporarily, but the general mood of the play remains one of desolation. The glimmer of hope that Hickey's arrival sparks in the patrons of the bar does not last long. Hickey does not accomplish his mission to drag his counterparts back to reality; he instead leaves them clinging even more tightly to their pipe dreams. Hickey comes to Harry Hope's with the intention of providing salvation for the hopeless, but he is instead the false prophet, bringing destruction instead of deliverance. The mood of this play is not hopeful because in the end, the members of the microcosm are all still drunk and hopeless, doomed to an existence characterized by unhealthy delusions and emotional isolation.
             Before Hickey's arrival at the bar, the occupants of the Harry Hope's are shown interacting with each other without the influence of Hickey. From the beginning of the play, tensions mount between characters, and rifts widen between friends. By the end of the play, Joe becomes an outsider and is frequently verbally attacked by the other men in the bar, and Lewis and Wetjoen get into a fist fight over a remark made by Hickey. The rest of the denizens hardly seem to speak to each other. The characters' main mode of expression throughout the play is through monologues, where characters spout off every random thought that runs through their heads with no regard to the people around them. None of the friendships am...