30 pages • 1 hour read
Elmer RiceThe Adding Machine
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1929A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Scene 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Scene 4 Summary
This scene begins in a court of justice. There is a jury made up of One through Six and their wives; two officers; and Zero, who is asked to stand before the jury. He begins a sensible monologue of complaint against his lawyers, but quickly devolves into adding up figures aloud, throwing in frustrations and complaints as he goes. The reason he gives for the murder is that his boss wouldn’t stop talking, but he appears to regret it now that he has found out how good and charitable his boss was, and that his boss was a family man. He begins to confess to other violent offenses, including a section using the n-word to confess he would have liked to take part in a lynching in Georgia. When he suggests the jurors would have done the same, they immediately find him guilty and file out from their box as he protests the sentence.
Scene 4 Analysis
This is an unusual court of law, made up of a jury of Zero’s peers–the very same group from his dinner party, in fact. Zero has already confessed to the murder, but begins a monologue in which he proceeds to dig himself further into a hole, confessing to previous acts of violence, including throwing a bottle at an umpire at a baseball game, and an elaborate racist fantasy regarding his desire to attend a lynching, and a confession to wanting to hurt a black man he encountered on the subway. This feels quite tangential to the through narrative of the play, and one may wonder why it was kept in at all when other full scenes have been removed and added back in across the previous century.
It is not until Zero suggests the jurors might have behaved as he did if they had been in his position that they give their sentence and file out of the box. The suggestion here is that they were perfectly happy to listen to the ravings of a madman, but as soon as the lunatic before them tried to implicate them and bring their own morality and behavior into question, they were anxious to get far away from him, and as quickly as possible.
