Essay Eugene O'neil

Patrick Rickert

Several different thematic ideas are conveyed though Oneill’s play, Long Days Journey into Night; however, the most prominent ideas are feelings of regret, alienation, and emotional death that exist through several different conflicts throughout the work. The three most important conflicts in this play that promote the ideas of a slow and painful emotional death occur between James and Mary Tyrone (Father and Mother), Eugene and himself (Person and self), as well as Mary and her decided future (Person and Fate). Each of these very different conflicts focus upon the idea that regret leads to social, familial, and personal conflicts and eventually the emotional death of the characters involved. Regret serves as the driver that causes the inevitable and fateful loss of ones own being and any sense of self worth and accomplishment. O’Neill emphasizes the power of regret and alienation, showing how these intense human emotions can lead to the downfall of the human spirit and eventually emotional death that causes the characters to long for physical death to comfort them in their continual suffering. These regrets leads to a character looking towards alternative means of explaining the events and struggles a character has endured, such as through blame or conflicts.

The most prolific and evident conflict in the play occurs between James and Mary Tyrone, the supposed supporters and foundation of the family. In the play, Mary blames James for every major hardship she has endured since meeting him, as well as the possible lifestyles she could have had before giving herself up for a sellout actor named James Tyrone. Mary blames James for her addiction to morphine because James sent her to a cheap sanatorium after the depressing and sickening death of her baby Eugene. Mary even blames James for Eugene’s death, which marks the end of hope, which is depicted when she says “I should not have let you persuade me to join you, just because I loved you…I’d proved by the way I left Eugene, I wasn’t worthy to have another baby… I never should have borne Edmund”, on pages 90-91. Mary blames him for Eugene’s death because she feels like she was forced away from caring for the rest of her family when spending all of her time with Tyrone, a popular actor at the time. Mary blames James for her loss of innocence and hope and says that if she had not married him, she would have become a nun or a concert pianist, both of which were highly unlikely. Mary blames Tyrone for her addictions, alienation from society and her own family, and all the factors that lead to her emotional death.

Edmund not only joins in the conflicts of others, but he also hosts conflicts against himself and his own life as a human being. Edmund is both socially and familialy alienated and he is forced to turn to nature for his only means of comfort and hope, as well as depicting how he continually searches for any possible meaning in his seemingly hopeless life, which described when he says, “It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish”, on page 157. Edmund not only questions the meaning of his own life, but also his existence as a human being at all.

Conflicts, which result from regrets of the past result in alienation from not only friends and family, but also separate them from society as a whole. This reversible isolation sometimes leads to a far worse and irreversible sickness: emotional death. In society, this same series of events takes place more often than many people think. People in our society who dwell in the past and refuse further progression in life alienate themselves from the rest of society, coupled with addiction regress into an irrecoverable state of emotional death. Many of these people suffer from seemingly endless emotional and mental distress, which causes some to feel that their only possible refuge from irreconcilable and inevitable conflicts can be found through physical death.