The Zoo Story Summary & Analysis

Not wanting to participate in the conversation, Peter is nevertheless driven to engage with Jerry out of his understanding of polite social norms. The zoo comes up for the second time—this time taking on a more ominous undertone.

Jerry’s assumptions make Peter uncomfortable for several reasons. First, Jerry knows things about Peter that Peter has not told him—Peter is uncomfortable with how quickly Jerry seems to have understood him. Second, Jerry is taking aim at Peter’s sense of masculinity, implying that Peter is not manly enough to produce a male child. This implication causes Peter to instantly get angry, suggesting that Peter is not secure in his masculinity.

Again, Jerry’s desire to understand Peter more deeply—to “know all about him”—makes Peter deeply uncomfortable. This is also the first time that a human is described in animal terms: Peter is made to feel like “a guinea pig,” studied by Jerry just as animals at the zoo are watched by the zoo-goers. Quickly, this is blurring the line between human and animal, suggesting that Peter may not be as civilized as he believes.

Peter and Jerry’s opposing views of animal life are on full display here. Peter keeps his animals domesticated and in cages, seeing them as creatures to be tamed for human enjoyment. Jerry, on the other hand, sees the cats as predators, capable of killing the parakeets were they not separated from them by the cage. One implication here is that the animalistic natures of Peter’s house pets are barely repressed, and chaos could break out if the cages failed. This can be seen as a subtle metaphor for Peter’s own animal instincts, which the play will go on to show are barely repressed and ready to turn dangerous at any moment.

Peter’s profession is important: as a textbook publisher, he works to provide the very sort of simple, categorical explanations that Jerry most despises. Peter’s somewhat simplistic way of thinking is apparent in his incorrect assumption, when Jerry asks his income and address, that Jerry is going to rob him. Jerry is so unnerving to Peter because his questions and actions cannot be explained, so it actually comforts Peter to think that Jerry might be a robber, since that would at least make sense. While Peter explains his settled position in mid-century, civilized, New York, Jerry refuses to even sit on the bench, signaling his discomfort with the basic behaviors of urban life.

Throughout the play, Jerry is fascinated by class and money—here, he’s mocking class divisions (“upper-middle” and “lower-upper” have effectively the same meaning), which seems to be a jab at the absurdity of social norms and manners. Peter’s critical response to this joke, and his claim to be in “publishing, not writing,” both indicate his reluctance to think of familiar things in a new light.

Peter seems excited when he assumes that Jerry lives in the West Village because it helps him make sense of who Jerry is. Jerry’s eccentric behavior has unsettled Peter so far, but being able to situate Jerry as living in the Village—a neighborhood known for its eccentric residents—helps Peter to categorize Jerry and therefore feel that he is safe, understandable, and predictable. But this feeling quickly shatters when Jerry informs him that in fact he lives on the Upper West Side, a neighborhood with a much stuffier character, which once again makes Jerry hard to classify. Furthermore, Jerry’s behavior is completely inexplicable—instead of taking the most efficient route to the zoo, he zig-zagged around town to get there. Jerry crucially explains his circuitous route as the only way to arrive at his destination “correctly.” Metaphorically, this gets at the heart of the personality difference between Peter and Jerry: Peter prefers straightforward, rational, simplistic thinking, whereas Jerry believes that to see the world as it is (or “correctly”), one must acknowledge its complexity and irrationality.

Rather than allowing Peter to easily put him in a box, Jerry seems to delight in barraging Peter with tons of details that are difficult to categorize or integrate into a simplistic portrait of who Jerry is. Readers also start to get a sense now that Jerry lives in some degree of poverty, and that he is deeply isolated despite living close to so many people. Finally, this monologue reveals how observant Jerry is of his surroundings and the other people around him, even if he doesn’t interact with them much. This adds to the sense that Jerry is a keen observer of the world and therefore implies that his perceptions should be taken seriously.

Jerry’s isolation from other people is confirmed here, as he seems to have lost touch with the writers of the letters he keeps—and as he has no one close enough to put in a picture frame. Jerry’s list of his possessions (even the most everyday ones) also affirms that he believes that every detail of a person’s life is important, even if they don’t add up to a simple, coherent narrative of who that person is. 

As Jerry recounts his family’s tragic saga, he avoids sentimental cliches completely. Rather than using his family story to neatly “frame” his current state, Jerry takes pleasure in subverting expectations: he shows little emotion about his parents’ deaths, and he spends as much time talking about his hot plate as he does on his mother’s affair.

As a textbook publisher, Peter traffics in categories and labels, and as a person, Peter is obsessed with social norms and manners. So it’s startling that they’re this far into the conversation—having already learned intimate details about each other’s families—before they learn each other’s names. This suggests that Jerry’s more complex view of the world—in which truth and nuance matter more than social norms—is taking precedence over Peter’s simpler one. More importantly, this passage highlights Jerry’s complex sexual identity. Adding to the difficulty in classifying him, he seems to identify neither as gay nor straight—in fact, he struggles to establish sexual intimacy with anyone.

Peter again tries to “pigeonhole” Jerry, declaring that his life and problems are “perfectly simple,” when the whole point of Jerry’s description of himself seems to have been to explain his own complexity. This dismissal of nuance would be offensive enough to Jerry on its own, but it seems that, on top of it, Peter is subtly implying that Jerry is really a closeted gay man, which would straightforwardly explain his sexual issues. Jerry lashes out at the simplification of his life and identity and, presumably, at Peter’s suggestion that Jerry is gay. But it’s worth noticing that Jerry doesn’t push back by asserting his heterosexuality—instead, he pushes back by questioning the entire enterprise of middle-class heterosexual life.

Peter now tries to bond with Jerry over their shared sexual desires. But, characteristically, Jerry thwarts this by complicating the situation. Here, he implies that real sexual experience is consistently disappointing to him—and that fantasy is always better. By implying that the same thing may be true of Peter, Jerry is suggesting that what is socially “normal” (preferring sex to sexual fantasy) is not necessarily natural or perhaps even desirable. In this way, Jerry is again showing how simplistic social expectations (like the expectation that men will enjoy heterosexual sex) fail to reflect complex reality.

Though ostensibly “the zoo” and the landlady are two totally unrelated stories, Jerry’s zig-zagging conversational style illustrates his own rule: that “sometimes a person has to go a long distance out of his way in order to come back a short distance correctly.” In other words, Peter’s understanding of what happened at the zoo may rely on his understanding of what happened with the landlady, even though this initially seems unrelated.

Again, Jerry moves away from “real” sex in order to engage in “fantasy” sex. Moreover, his disgust with the landlady—and the emphasis he places on this disgust—likely suggests a deeper sexual anxiety on Jerry’s part, although it’s not totally clear what that is. It might be that he’s generally repulsed by women, but that he feels he has to play up the landlady's specific repulsiveness in order to explain his own behavior without calling his masculinity into question.

Three important threads come together in this section: Peter and Jerry’s shared repulsion at the landlady hints at their larger (shared) fear of female sexuality. Peter’s secular, rational “beliefs”—in which complicated, unfortunate people exist only within the safe confines of print—is challenged by the much more worldly Jerry. And finally, Jerry uses Peter’s desire to learn what happened at the zoo to keep him listening and on the bench.

Here, the focus returns to masculinity and male sexuality, this time in its most basic, (literally) animal form: the male dog is irrepressibly drawn to Jerry and he always has an erection when Jerry sees him.  But a crucial aspect of this interaction is that, even as the relationship between Jerry and the dog seems antagonistic, it’s also a somewhat intimate relationship in which both creatures devote a lot of attention to the other, so hate and love are inextricably mingled. Likewise, Jerry’s plan to either befriend or kill the dog may seem to be pinballing between opposite extremes, but Jerry will later explain that a crucial thing he has learned in life is that kindness and cruelty are two sides of the same coin. The relationship between Jerry and the dog has obvious parallels to the relationship between Jerry and Peter, and the story of the dog will ultimately foreshadow the violence at the play’s end. 

Jerry tries to establish intimacy with the dog by interacting on the dog’s own terms: presenting him with meat. This is a little like the way that Jerry tries to get to know Peter on his own terms, by having a mostly polite conversation in the park. The intimacy between Jerry and the dog clearly has sexual undertones, as Jerry references the dog making “sounds in his throat like a woman” and uses the word “gratifying.” This thematically intertwines sexuality and violence, as the dog’s sexual desire and violent impulses seem to go hand-in-hand. The line between humans and animals is blurred here, as well, as Jerry begins to see a very human “smile” on the dog’s face.

It’s telling that Jerry tries to murder the dog with meat meant for humans—he has consistently viewed this dog with the kind of nuance and attention that’s typically reserved for humans, and this further blurs the distinction between human and animal. This part of the play also reveals something pivotal about Jerry, which is a key component of his aversion to simplicity: he believes that whenever he tries to skirt the truth in order to simplify a situation, it merely draws unwanted attention to himself, further alienating him from others. In this way, Jerry’s relentless insistence on honesty and complexity seems like a plea to the rest of the world to understand him for who he is, thereby making him feel less weird and alone.

 The dog, with its permanent erection and its threatening “smile,” embodies Jerry’s various insecurities about masculinity and human connection: it suggests that attraction and violence are intertwined, that Jerry is perhaps questionably masculine (as he is sexually desired by a male dog), and that he may never intimately connect with another being, as his efforts at bonding have ended in violence. This scene also perversely makes clear the depth of Jerry’s concern for the dog, as he’s just as attuned to the dog’s absence as he was to its presence.

Despite trying to murder the dog, Jerry now reveals that he actually wanted the dog to live—it seems that he saw the poisoning not as an attempt to end their relationship, but rather an attempt to change and even deepen it. In the wake of the poisoning, he was excited to see if they might understand each other differently or better now that they’d been through something extreme. This explicitly reflects Jerry’s desire for a thorough understanding of others, and it ominously foreshadows the lengths to which he might go to connect with Peter.

While Jerry previously showed a brief moment of compassion for the landlady when she was tending her sick dog (he stopped describing her as purely repulsive and remarked positively on her newfound sobriety and concern for the dog), he quickly returns to dismissing his landlady after the dog recovers. It’s not like Jerry to view someone as simple and one-dimensional (as he mostly does with his landlady), which is a clue that she triggers something in him that makes him very uncomfortable. Perhaps she makes him insecure about his inability to connect sexually with women. Regardless, there’s a striking contrast between Jerry’s complicated and loving description of the dog and his reductive and mean description of the landlady—to him, the dog certainly seems more human.

In one of the play’s pivotal passages, Jerry explains to Peter his deepest wish—to understand and be understood by another creature. But it seems that—at least to Jerry—mutual understanding can only come through difficulty and even shared trauma, which is a somewhat eccentric and dark view of interpersonal relationships. (After all, few people’s relationships would be considered close if it took an attempted murder to get there.) But it’s significant that Peter is so mesmerized by this—it seems that he may relate to this idea in some way or have some inkling that it’s true. 

Having described his possessions and neighbors (both human and animal), Jerry now begins to wonder why he is unable to make meaning with any of them. Unsatisfied with the material world, Jerry begins to turn to a higher power, calling on god and then worrying that god has abandoned him. Interestingly, Jerry shouts his first reference to god, as if hoping to be heard from above.

This passage illuminates the agony of Jerry’s previous remarks about failing to find meaning in his belongings and wondering about the existence of god. As it turns out, the dog story has a tragic ending: while they did indeed arrive at an understanding of one another, just as Jerry hoped, it did not result in a stronger connection between them. Actually, now that they understand each other, they both “feign indifference” anytime they see each other, so it seems that mutual understanding has made them less close than they once were. This leaves Jerry without a straightforward path to ending his isolation: all his attempts at building connection—even his most extreme one, poisoning the dog—have failed to improve his situation. What he hoped would be the “beginning” of contact was actually the end. Given the parallels between the dog story and Jerry’s interaction with Peter, this hints that he and Peter will also fail to connect.

Jerry believes that the intensity of feeling he first felt with the dog was born out of misunderstanding; as long as they didn’t understand each other, they had a reason to try to interact. But once they gained a mutual understanding, there was nothing left to connect them or cause them to engage with one another—indifference became the natural response, because there was nothing left to learn. However, as Jerry finishes his story about the dog, he finally sits next to Peter, signaling to the audience that he will now try to “make contact” with someone else (even after the painful end of the saga with the dog).

Jerry tries to put this story in terms Peter will understand: Reader’s Digest is an easily digestible, commercial book that would be quite familiar to Peter in his publishing career. But Peter refuses to “understand,” or at least to admit that he does—Jerry seems to believe that Peter does understand, which is why he’s so upset as to be nearly crying. Perhaps Jerry is right that Peter is merely refusing to understand because trying to take in something so complex and unresolvable frightens him.   

Even now, after he and the dog have reached an indifferent “understanding,” Jerry struggles to come to terms with their lack of a relationship. But just as Jerry admits that the dog is not his, he also seems to give up on reaching Peter. It’s not clear whether this is genuine, though, as Jerry claims that they’re too different to understand each other, a claim that runs contrary to the moral of the story that he just told. (The point of the dog story was that misunderstanding and difference are the only things that drive anyone towards each other.) In this light, it’s possible that Jerry is manipulating Peter here by playing to Peter’s investment in social norms; Jerry has made Peter feel rude for not engaging with his story, and, quite predictably, this causes Peter to re-engage with the conversation, giving Jerry another chance at what he really wants: to connect.

On the surface, this exchange seems reasonably polite—Jerry seems to make a self-deprecating joke about his own eccentricity, and Peter tries to put him at ease. But given the dog story, it’s possible to read Jerry’s insistence that Peter doesn’t know what to make of him as a provocation—perhaps Jerry knows that, just like with the dog, he and Peter will be inevitably drawn together until they reach a better understanding. In this way, Peter’s polite, dismissive responses seem impossibly naïve to the reality of the situation, especially considering the violence ahead. Jerry’s insistence that he’s not leaving  seems threatening for the first time, particularly given what happened with the dog.

As Peter tries to leave, Jerry knows that he has to do something drastic to keep him there, so for the first time he resorts to physical touch (rather than mere conversational tactics). This is an escalation in both the intimacy of their relationship and in the implicit level of threat—Jerry is behaving more aggressively and erratically now. For his part, Peter cannot keep up his polite, civilized manner in the face of Jerry’s animalistic tickling—and in fact, Peter too now blurs the line between human and animal, joking about the parakeets preparing dinner (thereby seeming human) while he himself laughs like a hyena. Peter’s civilized veneer has suddenly disappeared, adding credibility to Jerry’s view of human nature (that our animal instincts are always lurking, barely repressed). This moment is also curious from a gender perspective, as Peter, touched by another man (presumably an unusual occurrence for him), responds with “hysteria” (a word usually reserved derogatorily for women).   

Jerry finally begins to explain what happened at the zoo. But first, he critiques the format of the zoo itself: creatures cannot truly connect with each other if they are placed into boxes and “separated by bars.” Metaphorically, this critiques Peter’s worldview, as Peter prefers to interact with others by categorizing them and thereby reducing their complexity. To Jerry, this is akin to barring people off from one another and preventing true interaction. As Jerry makes this critique of separating people or animals from one another, he moves directly next to Peter, closing the physical separation between them.

When Jerry moves closer to Peter, Peter begins to lose his calm demeanor—and Jerry starts to become increasingly violent. In other words, the closer the men get to each other, the more instinctual and animalistic they become. It’s easy to see the parallel between this passage and the dog story; Jerry and the dog used physical antagonism to get emotionally closer to each other, and Jerry seems to be employing the same tactic here with Peter. The detail about the lion tamer going into the cages to feed the lions also evokes the dog story; going into the cages at the zoo represents overcoming the artificial boundaries that people have erected between humans and animals, and feeding the lions (at risk of injury) runs parallel to the way that Jerry fed the dog to make them closer. All of the details in this passage point to one thing: Jerry and Peter getting closer via a dangerous and violent interaction.

Peter becomes territorial about his bench, engaging in behavior that is reminiscent of a dog protecting its territory. Peter is also, for the first time in the play, abandoning his polite veneer and standing up for himself. For Jerry, this probably seems like progress—Peter is being more authentic to his emotions, rather than repressing them for the sake of being polite, which means that the two of them may finally have a chance to understand each other. Peter also reveals that he sits on this bench and reads a novel almost every Sunday. As Sunday is the day of worship in Christian faith, it is telling that Peter spends the day engaged in fully secular activities—unlike Jerry, who is curious about god because he finds little meaning in life elsewhere, Peter seems to have no use for spirituality.

While Peter and Jerry were polar opposites at the beginning of the play, they now begin to speak the same aggressive language and the bench has taken on outsized importance to both of them. Jerry seems to be deliberately provoking Peter—insulting his worldview, calling him a “vegetable," and ordering him to do dehumanizing things like lie on the ground—perhaps because he thinks that this is the way for them to get closer.

Peter’s useless attempt to call for the police further suggests that the men are no longer operating by the normal social rules of mid-century New York City; there’s no external force that can impose order on this interaction, and they must instead resolve their tension by themselves. Civilization seems to have finally dissolved in favor of more animalistic norms. Jerry’s reference to the criminalization of homosexuality emphasizes the pressure that both men feel to be traditionally masculine, and the mention of cops harassing gay men on the west side might be a nod to Jerry’s own complicated sexuality, since he himself lives on the west side of the park.

The two men have now completely moved away from any sort of civilized conversation—and, importantly, they’ve also flipped roles from the ones they initially occupied. While Peter was once the more polite and contained of the pair, he is now screaming illogically about a park bench while Jerry—the one who cared not at all for appearing polite or normal—is calmly telling Peter that his behavior makes him look ridiculous. This role reversal lends credibility to Jerry’s view that people are complicated and unclassifiable. Finally, while the bench was initially a symbol of aesthetic pleasure and evolved design, now it becomes an object to own and kill over.

Here, the boundary between human and animal is completely broken down: Peter’s family, with its confining cages and restrictive domestic norms, is a “zoo” now, suggesting that his family is both unnaturally restrictive and animalistic. When Jerry remarks that defending the bench must be a question of honor for Peter, it seems perceptive; the bench seems to have taken on the weight of Peter’s masculinity, which he wants to defend from Jerry’s physical advances. The association between the bench and masculinity is strengthened in the phallic imagery of “iron and wood.”

When Jerry accuses Peter of not knowing what other people need, Peter assumes that Jerry is referring to the bench. But that’s not likely true—what Jerry is probably implying is that Peter does not understand that Jerry feels the need to authentically connect with other people, which is why Jerry is instigating this interaction with Peter in the first place. To provoke a fight (and thereby bring them closer), Jerry ties violence to Peter’s masculinity, implying that he is not a man unless he fights Jerry over the bench.

As Peter gives in to his more animalistic instincts, Jerry begins to approve of him for the first time, complimenting his “dignity” (which is not the usual sense of the word, as “dignity” normally refers to restrained human behavior rather than animalistic violence). Peter and Jerry’s interaction becomes ever-more reminiscent of Jerry’s story about the dog: Jerry tried to kill the dog but he did not actually want the dog to die, and here, he pulls out a knife but then lets Peter wield it.

In a moment filled with homoerotic undertones, Jerry gets close to Peter’s face, grabs his clothing, and mocks his manhood. It is Jerry’s comment about Peter’s lack of a son—the comment that set Peter off at the very beginning of the play—that finally makes Peter pick up the knife, suggesting that Peter is most fragile on the question of his own masculinity.

Jerry’s suicide-by-impaling relies on distinctly phallic, penetrative imagery, which further intertwines masculinity and violence and shows how self-destructive masculine insecurity can be. Furthermore, this moment is an extreme blurring of the line between human and animal, since Jerry entirely loses his instinct for language as he expresses his pain through an animalistic scream. Finally, Peter—usually so reliant on atheistic human knowledge—turns to faith in this moment of crisis, shouting “oh my god” over and over. In this most extreme moment of the play, both men lose their rationality and humanity, showing that, at heart, they were never entirely what they appeared.

The whole play has been driven by the mystery of what happened at the zoo, which was implied to be so strange and momentous that it would be in the newspapers. But as it turns out, the “event” at the zoo was simply a decision; Jerry decided to find someone he could really get to know, which he did when he found Peter. On some level, though, Jerry knew that this would end in violence—and even in his own death—as this is what makes the day newsworthy. It’s hard to know how to interpret Jerry’s quasi-planning of his own death. Perhaps he felt that life was not worth living after the dog taught him that he could not connect with others, or perhaps he felt that the extreme event of impaling himself was the only way that he and Peter could make a connection. As Jerry is comfortable with ambiguity and contradiction, perhaps he believed both things at once. When Jerry begins to describe his relationship with Peter, he uses Biblical language (“you have comforted me” is a paraphrase of the New Testament verse Isaiah 12:1), which emphasizes the play’s sense that spirituality and irrationality might be the only way to grapple with the complexity of human life.

At the beginning of The Zoo Story, Jerry was desperate to keep Peter around so he could listen to his story; now that Jerry and Peter have understood each other, Jerry begins to push Peter to run away. This echoes the dog story, in which once two beings understood each other, they no longer had reason to interact. Moreover, Jerry assures Peter that he has kept his honor (and his manhood) by releasing his “animal” instincts. 

The final lines of the play are especially telling: the characters are far out of the realm of polite conversation about jobs, marriages, and family histories and into the animalistic and spiritual. Peter, letting out an animalistic “howl,” moves between instinct and a cry to god, searching for some explanation of the meaning of what just happened that cannot be found in his textbooks. Jerry, meanwhile, gives a joking reminder that the play’s title refers not just to the literal zoo, but also to the zoo in Peter’s home, where the “cats are setting the table”—and perhaps even to the zoo that the audience has just witnessed onstage. Finally, Jerry’s cry to god brings the lights down, leaving the show’s audience with the suggestion that human relationships are so complex that we need a higher power to help us “understand.”