Experience is a particular instance of personally encountering or undergoing something, in other words something happens to you and changes your life in anyway. Experiences change the path of life and they affect everyone differently; causing people to be happy, sad or mad when something happens. Experiences can cause things like grief, enlightenment and can change the path of someone’s life or how they view the world and their outlook on life. “Literature offers an experience” to me means when you read story it makes you feel like your living that experience, feeling how the characters felt, the pain, the joy, the hate and the hurt. You as the reader are learning the lessons with the character and taking the morals of those stories and applying them to real life. It’s like you lived that experience and take everything that someone who did live that experience takes from their experience and apply it to your life without having to actually go through it. That is the beauty of reading, it’s a lessoned learned; there is always a moral to the story, or at least something that you can take from it and learn. In the play “The Zoo Story” the characters Peter and Jerry go through an experience together that Albee describes in an animalistic metaphor. Peter starts telling Jerry about his family, after Jerry tells him he likes to talk to people and learn about them; bored with Peters passing storytelling and life Jerry starts physically harassing Peter. The metaphor of them being animals is hidden throughout the story. Jerry says he was coming from the zoo. I think that Jerry acts like he’s in the zoo and he has to prove himself and when Peter is so passive and content being “caged in” like one of his daughters parakeets I think Jerry loses his mind a little bit trying to get a rise out of Peter. He says to Peter "You'll read about it in the papers tomorrow, if you don't see it on your TV tonight.'' I think that was foreshadowing for what Jerry was about to do. Jerry starts pushing him around and when push comes to shove and Jerry ends up impaling himself with the knife. As a reader your left a little confused as to why Jerry is acting up, but I think you start to think that the animal metaphor starts making sense, Jerry couldn’t handle a civil life, he couldn’t just be another zoo animal he was too much for that and he snapped. Peter had a normal life and adjusted the way normal people do but Jerry was like a wild animal stuck in the zoo, caged in and stuck. Peter didn’t want Jerry to get impaled or plan for it to happen it just happened and there wasn’t really much he could do about it, it was like Jerry was trying to kill himself.
To me I think this play was the lesson of not being able to control everything, Peter didn’t know that Jerry was going to change his life like that, it was just a random encounter with a stranger at the park I’m sure the thought it was harmless and maybe a little odd. Jerry was becoming self-destructive because he needed things to be less controlled and all the structure was suffocating him like being caged in like the zoo was his own phobia. I learned from this play that things happen, you can’t always control them and you will not always like them but what really matters is how you react to the situations and how you deal with them and grow from the experience. Every experience is an opportunity to grow weather you take that opportunity or not is you purgative. “Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly” is a perfect quote because some people really do have to go all around to world to come back to one place, or jump through hoops and have all these things happen to them before they come to a conclusion they could have a long time ago but it just took them those extra steps for them to truly understand. Or it’s like the saying you don’t know what you have right in front of you. They’re looking everywhere when the answer is right in front of them.