Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill is a complicated story. It shows a day in the life of a dysfunctional family. This family is made up of four extremely different personalities. Tyrone is the sympathetic father. Mary is the morphine addicted mother. Jamie is the difficult older son and Edmond is the sick younger son. Everyone in this family has their strengths and weaknesses. In Tyrone’s case his strengths and the weight of his family’s weakness makes him the most sympathetic. Jamie is the opposite. His flaws weigh more than his family’s strengths. The typical reader can easily find Tyrone as the most sympathetic and Jamie as the least sympathetic.
After thirty five years of marriage (O’Neill 1618) and repeatedly watching his wife struggle with a morphine addiction (1658), Tyrone is still in love. Throughout the play Tyrone has shown his love for Mary both verbally and through O’Neill’s stage directions. Early in the play O’Neill adds stage directions when Tyrone says “[His voice is suddenly moved by deep feeling.] I can’t tell you the deep happiness it gives me, darling, to see you as you’ve been since you came back to us, your dear old self again. [He leans over and kisses her cheek impulsively- then turning back adds with a constrained air] So keep up the good work, Mary” (1613). This one passage shows that Tyrone is so overcome with emotion with the thought of his wife being back at home. The word impulsively shows exactly how much Tyrone is in love with Mary. He just cannot resist giving her a kiss to show her how much he means to him. He does not even wait to finish speaking to kiss her. Then Tyrone speaks with a “constrained air”. He is trying to not let his emotions show. He is ob...
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...lling to betray the person that he loves the most it assures the reader that he is the least sympathetic.
Dysfunctional is the norm for the Tyrone family. They are always blaming and making excuses for each other. Sometimes the apple does not fall far from the tree. The father and his son are similar. Sometimes a father and his son have similar qualities or hobbies. In Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night this is not the case. The Tyrone family is quite dysfunctional.
Works Cited
"Cynicism." The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. 2003. Houghton Mifflin Company 20 Oct. 2012 http://www.thefreedictionary.com/cynicism
O’Neill, Eugene.“Long Day’s Journey into Night.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. 7thed. Vol. D. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2007. 1610-1685. Print.
Wiesel’s community at the beginning of the story is a little town in Transylvania where the Jews of Sighet are living. It’s called “The Jewish Community of Sighet”. This is where he spent his childhood. By day he studied Talmud and at night he ran to the synagogue to shed tears over the destruction of the Temple. His world is a place where Jews can live and practice Judaism. As a young boy who is thirteen at the beginning of the story, I am very impressed with his maturity. For someone who is so young at the time he is very observant of his surroundings and is very good at reading people. In the beginning he meets Moishe the Beadle. Moishe is someone who can do many different types of work but he isn’t considered qualified at any of those jobs in a Hasidic house of prayer (shtibl). For some reason, though young Elie is fascinated with him. He meets Moishe the Beadle in 1941. At the time Elie really wants to explore the studies of Kabbalah. One day he asks his father to find him a master so he can pursue this interest. But his father is very hesitant about this idea and thinks young E...
In “Up the Coulee,” Hamlin Garland depicts what occurs when Howard McLane is away for an extended period of time and begins to neglect his family. Howard’s family members are offended by the negligence. Although his neglect causes his brother, Grant McLane, to resent him, Garland shows that part of having a family is being able to put aside negative feelings in order to resolve problems with relatives. Garland demonstrates how years apart can affect family relationships, causing neglect, resentment, and eventually, reconciliation.
Night is a memoir written by Elie Wiesel, a young Jewish boy, who tells of his experiences during the Holocaust. Elie is a deeply religious boy whose favorite activities are studying the Talmud and spending time at the Temple with his spiritual mentor, Moshe the Beadle. At an early age, Elie has a naive, yet strong faith in God. But this faith is tested when the Nazi's moves him from his small town.
The Road, a post-apocalyptic, survival skills fiction book written by Cormac McCarthy and published in 2006 is part of the Oprah Winfrey book club. During an interview with Oprah, McCarthy answered questions about The Road that he had never been asked before because pervious to the interview he had never been interviewed. Oprah asked what inspired the heart breaking book; it turns out that McCarthy wrote the book after taking a vacation with his son John. While on the vacation he imagined the world fifty years later and seen fire in the distant hills. After the book was finished, McCarthy dedicated it to his son, John. Throughout the book McCarthy included things that he knows he and his son would do and conversations that he thinks they may have had. (Cormac). Some question if the book is worth reading for college course writing classes because of the amount of common writing “rule breaks”. After reading and doing assignments to go along with The Road, I strongly believe that the novel should be required for more college courses such as Writing and Rhetoric II. McCarthy wrote the book in a way to force readers to get out of their comfort zones; the book has a great storyline; so doing the assignments are fairly easy, and embedded in the book are several brilliant survival tactics.
How could one dieny that the mass murder of six million jews never happened? These revisionist, or deniers, like to believe that it never did. Even with the witnesses, photos, buildings and other artifacts left behind, they still believe that the Holocaust is a hoax. The Holocaust deniers are wrong because there are people who have survived that wrote books, there is proof that Jews were being killed, and other evidence and artifacts have been found.
The story 'A View From The Bridge', is set in the 1940's in Red hook
Elie Wiesel, the author of Night, took the time to inform the world about his experiences as a prisoner of Auschwitz during the Holocaust in order for it to never happen again. Wiesel uses a language so unbearably painful yet so powerful to depict his on memories of the Holocaust in order to convey the horrors he managed to survive through. When the memoir begins, Elie Wiesel, a jewish teenager living in the town of Sighet, Transylvania is forced out of his home. Despite warnings from Moshe the Beadle about German prosecutions of Jews, Wiesel’s family and the other townspeople fail to flee the country before the German’s invade. As a result, the entire Jewish population is sent to concentration camps. There, in the Auschwitz death camp, Wiesel is separated from his mother and younger sister but remains with his father. As he struggles to survive against starvation, physical, emotional and spiritual abuse he also looses faith in God. As weeks and months pass, Wiesel battles a conflict between fighting to live for his father or letting him die, giving himself the best chance of survival. Over the course of the memoir, Wiesel’s father dies and he is left with a guilty conscience but a relieved heart because now he can just fend for himself and only himself. A few months later, the Allied soldiers free the lucky prisoners that are left. Although Wiesel survives the concentration camps, he leaves behind his own innocence and is forever haunted by the death and violence he had witnessed. Wiesel and the rest of the prisoners lived in fear every minute of every hour of every day and had to live in a place where there was not one single place that there was no danger of death. After reading Night and Wiesel’s acceptance speech of the Nobe...
How has your character changed in the book? What main events those lead to this change? How does the author show this change in writing?
Rodolfo, "I'm not a baby, I know a lot more than people think I know."
Throughout many of Toni Morrison?s novels, the plot is built around some conflict for her characters to overcome. Paradise, in particular, uses the relationships between women as a means of reaching this desired end. Paradise, a novel centered around the destruction of a convent and the women in it, supports this idea by showing how this building serves as a haven for dejected women (Smith). The bulk of the novel takes place during and after WWII and focuses on an all black town in Oklahoma. It is through the course of the novel that we see Morrison weave the bonds of women into the text as a means of healing the scars inflicted upon her characters in their respective societies.
"And Pecola. She hid behind hers. (Ugliness) Concealed, veiled, eclipsed--peeping out from behind the shroud very seldom, and then only to yearn for the return of her mask" (Morrison 39). In the novel The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, the main character, Pecola, comes to see herself as ugly. This idea she creates results from her isolation from friends, the community, and ever her family. There are three stages that lead up to Pecola portraying herself as an ugly human being. The three stages that lead to Pecola's realization are her family's outlook toward her, the community members telling her she is ugly, and her actually accepting what the other say or think about her. Each stage progresses into the other to finally reach the last stage and the end of the novel when Pecola eventually has to rely on herself as an imaginary friend so she will have someone to talk to.
Beauty is dangerous, especially when you lack it. In the book "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison, we witness the effects that beauty brings. Specifically the collapse of Pecola Breedlove, due to her belief that she did not hold beauty. The media in the 1940's as well as today imposes standards in which beauty is measured up to; but in reality beauty dwells within us all whether it's visible or not there's beauty in all; that beauty is unworthy if society brands you with the label of being ugly.
In the Spring of 1944, it was hard to imagine the horrendous acts of terror that would be bestowed on innocent people and the depth of Nazi evil. To Jews in a devout community with Orthodox beliefs and spiritual lifestyles, faith in God and faith in humanity would be shaken to the core as horrific, inhumane acts of torture and suffering were experienced by those in the concentration camps. Since the creation of the world, Jews have often associated darkness (or night) with the absence of God. Consequentially, Elie Wiesel struggled with this as the unimaginable atrocities took place in his life. Although a survivor, he has been haunted with guilt, questioned his faith and developed a lack of trust in humanity as a result of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel entitled his book about the Holocaust, “Night”, because darkness symbolized the evil death camps, and a permanent darkness on the souls of those who survived.
“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed”(Wiesel 32). Wiesel uses the symbolism of night to convey the death, the darkness, and the evils that started with the first night. In the memoir Night, Wiesel uses a distinct writing style to express what he went through, how he changed and how it affected the rest of his life, while in the concentration camps, during the Holocaust. He uses techniques like irony, imagery, symbolism, and a poetic syntax to describe his story of surviving the Holocaust. By applying these techniques, Wiesel projects a tone of bitterness, confusion and grief into his story. Through his writing Wiesel gives us a window into the complete abandonment of reason he adopted and lived in during the Holocaust.
Social class is a major theme in the book The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison is saying that there are dysfunctional families in every social class, though people only think of it in the lower class. Toni Morrison was also stating that people also use social class to separate themselves from others and apart from race; social class is one thing Pauline and Geraldine admire.Claudia, Pecola, and Frieda are affected by not only their own social status, but others social status too - for example Geraldine and Maureen Peal. Characters in the book use their social class as another reason for being ugly. Readers are reminded of the theme every time a new character enters into the book.