[The Time of Your Life] is set in a San Francisco waterfront honky-tonk, through which twenty-six strongly individualized persons pass, each one of whom expresses one facet of the character of mankind. Every man at some time in his life might be like Dudley, who lives for love; or like Wesley, who considers life a battle between himself and the machine; or like Harry, sick at heart, but wanting to make people laugh; or like McCarthy, the muscular longshoreman who is a philosopher; or like his friend, Krupp,...

A careful reading [of The Time of Your Life] shows that Joe [the play's central character] may be seen as a valid Christ-figure—not a literal Christ, for The Time of Your Life is no Second Coming, nor even an allegorical Christ, but a type of Christ, essentially realistic and certainly very human—whose nature and behavior are completely consonant and who takes on stature as heroic protagonist within such a mode. Whether Saroyan consciously created Joe as Christ-figure is immaterial; thi...