Man’s Struggles of Fate by the Curse of Birth in Eugene O'Neill's A Long Day's Journey into Night
Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey into Night deals with tragedy and its attendant focus on character rather than plot. Another emphasis on the play is on the past that ceases to haunt his characters. O’Neill’s characters of A Long Day’s Journey into Night struggle with the past. These characters all seem to agree with Mary Tyrone who claims that a person “can’t help being what the past made him” (Baym 1313). The fact that a character can struggle with his or her past suggests that the past is something open to question, changeable, and perhaps even unknowable. Patricia Schroeder says “The past as it invades the present or as individual characters interpret it had little currency on the formally realistic stage” (Schroeder 30). O’Neill’s characters of A Long Day’s Journey into Night reveal the ongoing past gradually and continuously throughout the play. As one reads the play, he or she can see O’Neill deal with his own past through these characters.
For Eugene O’Neill, there is only one real subject for drama: The subject here is the same ancient one that always and always will be the one subject for drama, and that is man’s struggle with his own fate. The struggle used to be with the gods, but it is now with himself, his own past. Implicit in this statement are a number of O’Neill’s fundamental principles in this play and his own life. O’Neill embeds principles of Greek tragedy within a naturalistic play and so fully realizes his lifelong goal of dramatizing “man and this struggle with … himself, his own past” (Schroeder 30). In this play it is, indeed, the “struggle” to understand the formative past that s...
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...less present of the Tyrones”. “O’Neill not only challenged the distinction between the past and present, he also broke down the barrier between stage and spectator that had been erected along with the proscenium arch”.
The man’s struggle with self, fate and the past is a common theme among many modernist writers. Through O’Neill’s experimentation of eliciting an emotional response through his realistic settings and characters, we learn more about the “common man.” We all struggle with our pasts and our place in this world. At least through works like A Long Day’s Journey into Night we know that we are not alone in having a “dysfunctional” family with problems and conflicts. We all have problems, struggles and fears. These elements are just a part of life. Life is taking our past and learning from it so that we can live our present and prepare for a future.
These feelings drive O’Brien to seek out a journey in order to find out what is truly valuable to his self being. His adventure of self-knowledge mirrors the narrative archetype of the Hero’s Quest. One might argue that as a result of O’Brien’s uncooperative nature towards his circumstances, he is able to pursue the main motive of the Hero’s Journey, in which he departs from his ordinary world and is able to obtain the life treasure of self-acknowledgement.
During, McCandless scavenger for sense of peace within himself, a chance to calm the violent emotions from the complicated relationship with his parents with his father disloyalty. However through, the mental isolation and solitary experience during the deep forest for several weeks, McCandless began to contemplate not human relationship is not a necessity. His exper...
The story describes the protagonist who is coming of age as torn between the two worlds which he loves equally, represented by his mother and his father. He is now mature and is reflecting on his life and the difficulty of his childhood as a fisherman. Despite becoming a university professor and achieving his father’s dream, he feels lonely and regretful since, “No one waits at the base of the stairs and no boat rides restlessly in the waters of the pier” (MacLeod 261). Like his father, the narrator thinks about what his life could have been like if he had chosen another path. Now, with the wisdom and experience that comes from aging and the passing of time, he is trying to make sense of his own life and accept that he could not please everyone. The turmoil in his mind makes the narrator say, “I wished that the two things I loved so dearly did not exclude each other in a manner that was so blunt and too clear” (MacLeod 273). Once a decision is made, it is sometimes better to leave the past and focus on the present and future. The memories of the narrator’s family, the boat and the rural community in which he spent the beginning of his life made the narrator the person who he is today, but it is just a part of him, and should not consume his present.
The tradition of the tragedy, the renowned form of drama based on human suffering that invokes an accompanying catharsis, has principally become a discontinued art. Plays that evoke the sense of tragedy-the creations of Sophocles, Euripides, and William Shakespeare-have not been recreated often, nor recently due to its complex nature. The complexity of the tragedy is due to the plot being the soul of the play, while the character is only secondary. While the soul of the play is the plot, according to Aristotle, the tragic hero is still immensely important because of the need to have a medium of suffering, who tries to reverse his situation once he discovers an important fact, and the sudden downturn in the hero’s fortunes. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is the modern tragedy of a common man named Willy Loman, who, like Oedipus from Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, exhibits some qualities of a tragic hero. However, the character Willy Loman should not be considered a full-on tragic hero because, he although bears a comparable tragic flaw in his willingness to sacrifice everything to maintain his own personal dignity, he is unlike a true tragic hero, like Oedipus, because he was in full control of his fate where Oedipus was not.
The film ‘O’ directed by Tim Blake Nelson is a recognised contemporary interpretation of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy Othello, which addresses a number of issues that are relevant to a modern day audience compared to that of the past. The director of the film has changed crucial parts of the play which makes the play such a classic, which has essentially ruined the literary value of Othello. This is evident for a number of concepts including, the overt links between the play and film, the power of words and language and Iago and his motives
...ence more reasoning to the jealousy of the characters and the actions they take. With the changed setting come many differences: drugs and alcohol, peer pressure, violence, and different sources for jealousy and hatred. These issues are the dilemmas we, as teenagers in this new millennium, are faced with day to day. "O" addresses these new era evils without abandoning the original themes and major issues of Shakespeare's Othello. The audience can relate to a story written down hundreds of years ago and benefit from it.
There is particular consideration given to the political climate in this story. It is incorporated with social and ethnic concerns that are prevalent. The story also addresses prejudice and the theme of ethnic stereotyping through his character development. O'Connor does not present a work that is riddled with Irish slurs or ethnic approximations. Instead, he attempts to provide an account that is both informative and accurate.
Snyder, Susan. "Beyond the Comedy: Othello" Modern Critical Interpretations, Othello Ed. Harold Bloom, Pub. Chelsea House New Haven CT 1987. (page 23-37)
In Making History Hugh O'Neill was a well-liked character who also proved himself not only a good man, but intelligent and sensible. He inspires a large amount of sympathy in the audience. O?Neill had been fighting, backed by the Irish population, for Spain's support to rid themselves of the English for many years.
The various ways in which manhood appear and emerge within cultures has an extensive examination and definition of the meaning of a man and how a man needs to be. The notion of manhood and masculinity is shown in the main characters of the works of J. M. Coetzee and Toni Morrison. Boyhood: Scenes from a Provincial Life by J. M. Coetzee and Home by Toni Morrison are both set in different places with different cultures which result in different meanings of what a man is. Coetzee’s autobiographical fiction novel, Boyhood, takes place in South Africa during the time of the conflicts of cultural identity and race. Boyhood tells the story of the main character John, a young boy who is smart, intellectual and sensitive. John always feels unique and different, he always thinks about himself and about his uniqueness. His uniqueness and alienation from his environment cuts him off as a child and affects his growing conditions and manhood. On the other hand, Morrison’s, Home, tells the story of the aftermath of the main character, Frank Money’s, life. Money, 24 year-old, participated in the Korean War and then got discharged from the Army. During the war Money, killed many lives, including the soul of a young Korean girl that he never forgets; Money’s two best friends were both killed during the period of the war. These events left Money with a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which affected his sanity and manhood. While the literature shows how culture, race, people and events, can affect manhood this paper will study and explore the theme of manhood differently between the main characters Coetzee and Money.
As their journeys progress, each man is forced to overcome certain obstacles and hardships. At the end
...ith the lack of closure the author has paved many paths, making one unable to give a proper retelling of the play due to various interpretations. The play has also slyly inserted a philosophy on human life, the uncertainty and how it is a major part of human life is portrayed through this play. All these characteristic together make this play a very good play, it makes one want to live forever as to see what future generations would interpret the play as. In conclusion, this text is written to make the readers think and participate as active members in the reading of the play.
Family is something that is prevalent in everyone’s life, whether it’s biological, non-blood or estranged. Eugene O’Neill’s play shows how his family of four deals -- or doesn’t deal -- with their issues with themselves and eachother. The autobiographical play serves as a catharsis for O’Neill as he reveals his inner thoughts and feelings through his own character, Edmund. Long Day’s Journey into Night illustrates the ironic but important life lesson that Edmund learns that results in a deeper understanding of life and family. While family is supposed to nurture you and love you the most, they’re the same people who hurt you the most. This is shown through the insight he gains while exploring his relationships with his father,
One of the major themes in the play, “A Moon for the Misbegotten” by Eugene O’ Neill, is the fact that people are rarely what they seem to be at first glance. We see this theme in at least three out of the six characters in the play. “A Moon for the Misbegotten” is the story of an Irish father, Phil Hogan, and his daughter Josie who live in a small shanty on a farm in Connecticut.
One of America's finest playwrights, Eugene Gladstone O'Neill's great tragedies were greatly influenced by his own experiences with his dysfunctional family. He used these occurrences to craft one of the most successful careers in the earliest 20th century, earning countless awards including the Nobel Prize for Literature, four Pulitzer Prizes, Antoinette Perry Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Out of all of these Greek-like tragedies there emerged his only comedy, Ah, Wilderness!; a period piece set in his summer home of New London, CT. O'Neill referred to this play as the "other side of the coin", meaning that it represented his fantasy of what his own youth might have been, rather than what he believed it to have been (as seen in his magnum opus, Long Day's Journey into Night). These two plays are his two most auto-biographical plays, Long Day's Journey dramatizing his family, and Ah, Wilderness! paralleling it.