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 denial, love, and addiction is also seen between mother and sons. At one point, Mary is seen, like Jamie, refilling the liquor bottle with water to keep the level the same. The family 'trick' keeps up appearances for both characters. This sameness in protective mechanisms of addiction seems both touching as well as tragic -- both child and mother protecting one another from one another's knowledge, through the same 'hiding' behavior, as if heredity creates both the hideous and debilitating nature addiction and the protective, loving mechanism to cover up the addiction from the family.
The Tyrone family is thus loving, but the individual members cannot help but self-destruct and implode, and thus no one member can pull the others from the addictive pits they are sinking into. Even Tyrone seems to resort to the same coping mechanisms as he did as a child, as when he insists on getting cheap care for his wife, even though the cheapness of her care from Doctor Harry may be one of the reasons she has relapsed, at least if one believe the implications of his son Jamie.
Mary could be giving voice to O'Neil's fatalistic attitude as a playwright when she says, "But I suppose life has made him [her husband] like that, and he can't help it. None of us can help the things that life has done to us" (63). Mary's father was an alcoholic, the play notes, and she seems to have reconfigured this relationship in her adult marriage. Tyrone's own, unflattering addiction to hording money comes, not from nowhere but Tyrone's legacy of working twelve hours a day in a factory when he was a child, alongside his mother and sisters. They worked their fingers to the bone, just to survive, and barely had enough to eat from day-to-day. Tyrone still...
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
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