O'neill Deal With His Own Past example essay topic

Eugene O'neil And A Lond Day's Journey Eugene O'neil And A Lond Day's Journey Into Night Man's struggles of Fate by the Curse of Birth 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 (Schroeder 29).

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 shapes the present action. In O'Neill's life, it is the play that helps him through his past. O'Neill's A Long Day's Journey into Night serves as therapeutic for the dramatist's life and an explication of his family's story.

His last wife, Carlotta Monterey O'Neill describes his approach to writing the play about his own family's tragedy. She says that his past haunted him and that he was bedeviled into writing it. She explains that he needed to get it out of his system and to forgive whatever it was that caused this tragedy between himself and his mother and father (Szeliski 65). "I think he felt freer when he got it out of his system. It was his way of making peace with his family– and himself' (Szeliski 65). Eugene O'Neill can be best compared to the character of Edmund Tyrone.

O'Neill along with Edmund grew up in hotels as his parents toured with the theater. He too used alcohol as an escape to reality and the past. After tuberculosis nearly killed him, he sobered up and decided to write plays. O'Neill brakes away from drama traditions and experimented by conveying emotions in his plays, opening a world of the mind, memories and fears. In A Long Day's Journey into Night O'Neill dramatizes the complexity of family life. O'Neill writes the play with sympathy to all the characters of the play.

"Each Tyrone was both a victim and oppressor, and none of them could escape' (Baym 1289). What this means is that each character is a victim of their past, but yet they do not do anything to reach success or to move on. Instead, each character goes to a drug to escape their misfortunes and pasts. In an argument about Jamie's drinking problem Tyrone tells Mary: "So, I'm to blame because the lazy hulk has made a drunken loafer of himself? Is that what I came home to listen to? I might have known!

When you have the poison in you, you want to blame everyone but yourself' (Baym 1335). Each character blames everything on someone or something else. This idea brings the reader back to the idea about escaping the past. O'Neill's play dramatizes moments of both anguish and love. The focus on character and the priority he assigns to memory delivers the emotional power of the play. The action is largely retrospective, and contrasts a dynamic and continually influential past with a present void of possibilities.

The play depends greatly on alcohol consumption. As the characters get increasingly intoxicated throughout the play their inhibitions are lowered and they reveal their inner most selves. The play proceeds as the characters struggle to confront the past, whether by denial of responsibility for it, reconstruction of it, or confession of it. The alcohol and drugs serve as an escape for the characters from their pasts and the effect that the past has on the future and present. In a conversation with Mary and Edmund about Edmund's illness, Edmund says, "Listen, Mama!

You " re not so far gone yet that you " ve forgotten everything. You haven't found out what I found out this afternoon. Don't you give a damn?' (Baym 1338). O'Neill had tried the same approach to forget the past until drinking his way to tuberculosis. O'Neill stresses the importance of responsibility as well in this play. When arguing with her husband about having to live in cheap hotels, Mary apologizes for recalling the dark past: "No, dear.

But I forgive. I always forgive you. So, don't look so guilty. I'm sorry I remembered out loud. I don't want to be sad, or to make you sad. I want to remember only the happy parts of the past' (Baym 1336).

What the characters do not realize is that the only way to overcome the past is by remembering and learning from it. O'Neill faced this same dilemma until writing the play. By writing his family's story with fictional characters, he is able to unleash his inner most feelings and aggression over the past. It allows him to understand his past and move on. Although O'Neill is able to move on, the characters of the play remain haunted by the past. The play depicts the aftermath and the continuing helplessness of despair and human failing (alcoholism, penury and addiction) on the "haunted' Tyrone family.

The ghost motif is used throughout the entire play representing the inescapable past. O'Neill refers to these ghosts often because he himself has had these same ghosts. The Tyrones are unable to come to terms with their true emotions or their memories, and their consequent rejection of responsibility of present actions. Through their conflicts and arguments the audience is able to see these hidden emotions. The play serves as O'Neills unmasking of his past.

Each page unleashes his emotions of what he is feeling about his past. While describing the effects the play had on him Carlotta says", it was a most strange experience to watch that man being tortured every day by his own writing. He would come out of his study at the end of the day gaunt and sometimes weeping I think he felt freer when he got it out of his system' (Szeliski). This freedom came from meeting the past face to face instead of letting it him haunt him again and again. The action of the play takes place in the audience mostly. The audience is constantly forced to alter his or her vision of the past, since the characters contradict each others's tories in virtually every line of the dialogue.

Mary's version of her father's comfortable home and of her longing to join a convent, for example, is the truth as Mary remembers it and as the audience first knows of it. Tyrone's interpretation of her middle-class home as ordinary and his description of the young Mary as "a bit of a rouge and coquette, God bless her' (Baym 1353) cast suspicion on Mary's memories, on the audience's understanding of the past, and on the credibility of both characters. This cycle of continual reinterpretation through dialogue portrays the past as changeable, continually influential, and never fully knowable, and forces the audience into subjective truths and disputed memories that "hovers over the seemingly hopeless present of the Tyrones' (Szeliski 51). "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' (Szeliski 51). 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.