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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text's major themes.
Heat
Throughout the play, heat serves as a motif that emphasizes the mounting tension and anger in the jury room. From the beginning, the jurors complain about the sweltering heat, noting that it’s the hottest day of the year. The intensity of the setting parallels the intensity of the task ahead of them: their deliberation will determine whether a boy lives or dies. The jurors attempt to get the fan to work but fail, just as they initially fail to agree upon a verdict, their discussion instead dissolving into shouting and arguments. The twelve men must stay in the hot room and face their increasingly heated emotions until they reach a consensus; cooler heads must prevail in order for them to reach a determination. The heat also evokes a sense of hell: the jurors are trapped in a place outside of their normal lives, and they are forced to face the shadow parts of themselves—their prejudices, their personal sins, their complacency—in order to leave.
Baseball and Games
The motif of baseball and other games emphasizes that some of the jurors don’t take the proceedings seriously and are playing with the boy’s life. The 7th Juror repeatedly mentions the baseball game he hopes to make it to, suggesting that it is much more important to him than the boy’s fate. He uses baseball metaphors throughout, calling people “slugger” and “Milwaukee,” which highlights his fixation and the privileged position he is in compared to the boy. He can, after all, enjoy the luxury of caring about something as frivolous as baseball rather than wonder whether he will live or die. Like the 7th Juror, the 3rd Juror struggles to take his duties seriously, as illustrated by his trying to play tic-tac-toe and joking that a baseball player murdered the boy’s father. The 3rd Juror turns to games when the tension of deliberation frustrates him, and they serve as an escape for a situation he often finds intolerable. Through their references to games, these jurors demonstrate how often they put their personal interests above their concern for the boy on trial.
Fathers and Sons
The motif of fathers and sons illustrates how this relationship can become infected by toxic, violent ideas about stereotypical masculinity. The boy is on trial for killing his father, who beat him regularly. This reality is trigging for the 3rd Juror, who had a similar relationship with his own son and can identify with the dead man. The 3rd Juror tells the other jurors that he hit his son to make a man out of him, suggesting that for the two father-son pairs in the play, violence is an expression of their fraught dynamics and a painful reinforcement of a skewed concept of masculinity. Both sons in the play turn violent, too. The 3rd Juror’s son hits his father back, and the boy on trial has a prior history of violence, suggesting that the cycle of violence is perpetuated from father to son. Regardless of whether or not the boy killed his father, it is a fact the boy suffered at the hands of his father. The 3rd Juror likens his son’s estrangement from him as a kind of murder, which suggests that he finds their separation incredibly painful. The 3rd Juror attempts to transmute this heartache into further violence by crusading for the boy to be put to death.
