¶ … Journey into Night It is an irony of Eugene O'Neill's career that his large-scale expressionist dramas of the 1920s and 1930s -- which earned Pulitzers for works like Strange Interlude and ultimately the Nobel Prize in Literature for O'Neill himself -- seem to have fallen entirely out of the repertory, and O'Neill is remembered chiefly for his least characteristic plays: Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh. O'Neill's biographers Arthur and Barbara Gelb note that not only do these plays share an obsessive central concern with alcohol, O'Neill also "set both in 1912" and to some extent Long Day's Journey "can be regarded as its sequel" (Gelb and Gelb 506). The posthumous publication and staging of this autobiographical domestic drama Eugene O'Neill's classic American domestic drama Long Day's Journey Into Night has raised the question of why O'Neill apparently withheld the play during his lifetime. To some extent the honesty of its depiction of alcoholism seems to have been too much for him to acknowledge publicly, corresponding precisely with the metaphoric use of alcohol in The Iceman Cometh as a means of avoiding the truth through "pipe dreams." In Iceman the embittered ex-radical Larry, who serves as Greek chorus in O'Neill's saloon-room epic, summarizes the alcoholic's "pipe dreams" this way: "The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober. And that's enough philosophic wisdom to give you for one drink of rot-gut" (Iceman 9). In other words, the play about alcoholism which O'Neill staged during his lifetime insists on the similarities of the "pipe dreams" of alcoholics as an expressionist version of what motivates ordinary people. In Long Day's Journey,...
Over the course of the day which provides the play with its brooding title, the Tyrone family interacts with alcohol -- starting, seemingly, at breakfast -- and alcohol is always present and visible onstage, like a baleful additional character within the confines of O'Neill's small-cast chamber drama. I hope to demonstrate that the image of alcohol is deliberately used to provoke a set of specific assocations which cluster around the word Jamie uses to describe his drinking -- "romantic." I will show how O'Neill clusters the imagery and the use of alcohol in the play around three different ideas of the "romantic," in the sense of erotic, foolish, and sublime or death-dealing (in its manifestation as the specific aesthetic of the Romantic movement). But in conclusion I will address alcohol's role within the play's larger treatment of addictive substances generally, and also the way in which alcohol is actually O'Neill's ultimate clue to the play's meaning, through its role in the dramatic climax of the play's closing moments.
Eugene O'Neill Long Days Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill Eugene O'Neill's work "Long Day's Journey into Night" has been critically described as an autobiographical work, a tragedy with universal appeal and a Taoist manuscript among other descriptions. Long Day's Journey into Night might indeed be described as the autobiographical work of one of the most well-known dramatists, who incorporated aspects of every day living and the nature of human instinct and
Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) is one of the most prolific, most highly recognized American playwrights of the 20th century who sadly had not real American contemporaries or precursors. O has been the only American dramatist to win the coveted Nobel Prize and while his work is for American audience and is certainly American in most respects, we notice that he has been greatly influenced by European writers and thinkers who shaped
Thus Mary loves Tyrone, as when she says, "That was in the winter of senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time," in the final act. But Mary and Tyrone's sameness as two people both keeps them together but creates mechanisms, such as addiction, that keep them apart. This connection through
Iceman Cometh is a brilliant play by Eugene O'Neill that experiments with the painful side of emotional life. It's all about the different dreams that people aspire to achieve. They live with the hope of one-day achieving them and this is what make their days go by. The characters in this play are all broken-hearted souls who live with their never-ending aspirations of having a better tomorrow. About the Playwright
Eugene O'Neill's play, "The Emperor Jones (1921)," is the horrifying story of Rufus Jones, the monarch of a West Indian island, presented in a single act of eight scenes of violence and disturbing images. O'Neill's sense of tragedy comes out undiluted in this surreal and nightmarish study of Jones' character in a mighty struggle and tension between black Christianity and black paganism (IMBD). Jones is an unforgettable character in his
It is the context of Catholic Ireland (and not so much the Hays Production Code) that allows Ford's characters to enjoy the light-heartedness of the whole situation. Such context is gone in O'Neill's dramas. O'Neill's Irish-American drinkers have left the Emerald Isle and traded it over for a nation where religious liberty denies the right of any religion to declare itself as true and all others as false. The Constitution,
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