O’Neill’s Concept of Tragic Vision in Reference to “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” Essay Example

rise to the emotional height of that of Shakespeare.

O’Neill’s idea of tragic vision makes him an individual leading light of modern tragedy. To him, men have no control on this tragic vision because it occurs by the external forces. External forces include “Heredity and Environment”. So none can lame the characters of the play and the theme of forgiveness comes naturally here. Here in my term paper, I would like to focus on O’Neill’s concept of tragic vision in Long Day’s Journey into Night. Long Day’s Journey into Night is undoubtedly a tragedy-it leaves the audience ith a sense of catharsis through the fall of something powerful event that was once great. Though biographical in nature, the play has become a universal one representing the problems of a family that cannot live in the present, mired in the dark recesses of a bitter, troubled past. The play covers one day in a family’s life. It’s a deeply tragic play, but without any violent dramatic action. The play is shattering in its depiction of the agonized relations among father, mother and two sons.

Spanning one day in the life of the family, the play strips away layer after layer from each other of the four central characters, revealing the mother as a defeated drug addict; the father as a man frustrated in his career and failed as a husband and father’ the older son as a bitter alcoholic and the younger son as a tubercular disillusioned youth with only the slenderest chance for physical and spiritual survival. At the final curtain, they are still together, trapped y the past. Each of them is

guilty and yet innocent. They scorn, love and pity one another.

They realize and yet do not understand each other’s emotions. They forgive but are Renaissance 2/6 apparently doomed never to be able to forget the hurt they’ve inflicted on each other. Although they seem to hurt and destroy one another y their constant conflict, their true tragedy is caused by what life has done to them, by the forces of heredity and environment over which they have no control. O’Neill’s tragedies are redefined in the light of absurd, existentialism, nihilism, philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, naturalism, Freudian-psycho-analytical theories, surrealism, humanism etc.

His characters are pursued by their past misdeeds. A memory of their past misdeeds dogs their lives and it creates tragic atmosphere. Schopenhauer espoused a sort of philosophical pessimism that saw life as being essentially evil, futile, and full of suffering. The way out for man was the denial of the will to get eternal tranquility through the aesthetic activity—the highest form of art—tragedy. As a writer of tragedy, O’Neill has often charged with being a prophet of pessimism.

He’s a pessimist in different outlook who loves life well enough to condemn those who avoid it in fear and trembling and to urge those who can face its reality to make the most of it. Finally O’Neill comments on his view of tragic vision as-‘’Life in itself was nothing. It was only dream that kept man-fighting, willing; living”. We get this philosophy of life from the play. Here all the characters are above all courageous and defiant. It is this quality in them which gives exhilaration to the grimmest tragedy

of O’Neill. They may and they do go down to defeat and death.

But they never ask to be forgiven. They are game to the end, sometimes they realize the reason for their failure but they always accept it bravely. For Nietzsche, he emphasized the importance of the will to power and concluded that the spirit of the god of wine or the rebirth of the spirit of the god of wine through the destruction of individuation was the spirit of tragedy. His declaration of "God has died" overturned the old European conventions and ideas. He posed to re-evaluate all the contemporary values and morality with the rejection of nihilism.

O’Neill’s tragedies are also related to the philosophy of Nietzsche, in this one respect that they are an affirmation of life; they deal with life for the sake of living and not for the sake of eternity; as we get the idea from his play, Long Day’s Journey into Night. Naturalism is next to above philosophical view which O’Neill adopted to show his concept of tragic vision. It used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. Naturalistic writers were influenced by Darwin’s theory of evaluation.

They believed that one’s heredity and social environment largely determine one’s character. In the play, James Tyrone is the acute victim of heredity. Tyrone is the son of an Irish immigrant who deserted his wife when the boy was 10 to return to Ireland. James was forced to work continuously as a boy. This childhood experience bred in him an Renaissance 3/6 exaggerated awareness of the importance

of money, which is the root of all evil. He continued to work hard, became a successful actor and soon rose to the top of his profession.

Soon after he achieved such great success as the hero of a romantic melodrama, that he gave up serious acting and spent the rest of his professional career making money. Thus, James Tyrone prostituted his artistic career to money-making and lost his own self respect. The tragedy of the play therefore is forced in part by James Tyrone’s miserliness and materialism. Environment or circumstances also control the tragedy of O’Neill’s plays. According to Winther, “O’Neill has made his characters the victims of the circumstances over which they have no control.

They fight against adverse circumstances and though they are defeated, their spirits are never crushed”. Each of the circumstances is interlinked with one another. The shifting of Tyrone’s from Ireland to America brings the rootlessness and the cultural shock to family specially to Marry. She can’t cope with the environment. Because of childhood’s experience James Tyrone gives much important to money than family and home. Every misfortune of Mary’s life, she blames on the fact that she never had a home. When she moved away from her father’s house she began the downward journey into the regions of lost ones of this world.

First it was the dirty and loneliness of cheap hotel rooms, then the sense of futility in bringing up her children, the death of her second child, the sickness following the birth of her third, and finally, the terrible decision that had to be made every fall-whether to take her children with

her on the road or leave them in the care of a nurse. In the end, she lost her health, she lost one child to death, the other two to a world that revolted her, and she lost her faith. As Jamie has a Oedipus complex love for his mother he tries to misguide Edmund.

Jamie always considers Edmund as the cause for Mary’s addiction. He influenced Edmund badly. On the other hand, father forces Jamie to become an actor on which Jamie has no passion and for this reason he never becomes successful. And Marry treats Jamie as the murderer of her second son and dislikes him. Mary became sick after giving birth to Edmund. She was prescribed morphine by an incompetent doctor and became addicted to it. She also feels guilty about Edmund’s bad health. To escape from harsh reality Mary always takes morphine and goes to illusion of past.

By the end of the play, she has regressed completely into the past and she talks as if she is still a girl at the convent. Thus Circumstances play an important role to control the whole tragedy of the family. According to O’Neill, the man and women of his tragedies are victims of a cosmic trap, cold and impersonal as steel. His tragedy must deal with the fall of man from prosperity into adversity in a manner that is ‘shocking’ and through causes that lie within man himself in relation to the outward forces of his world. He is brought to disaster by forces that are stronger than he is.

This attitude toward man has been apparent in O’Neill’s plays

from the first to the last. For example, in Long Day’s Journey into Night; Mary who has struggled for years with her incapable despair, says to Edmund,” It’s wrong to blame your brother. He can’t help being what the past has made him. Any more than your father can. Or you. Or I ’’. Again later, she knows that there is no escape, she thinks of her happiness as a student in the convent, “You were much happier”, She Renaissance 4/6 says to herself “when you prayed to the Blessed Virgin.

If I could pray again’’. But it is impossible. There is no will that can conquer the forces of life that have imprisoned her. Tyrone asks her to “forget the past”. Her answer is, “How can I? The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. We all try to lie about that, but life won’t let us’’. All the Tyrones are caught in the same trap. Each character has his flaw and failure. He is a combination of the inner self, which is the life force, trying to deal with the circumstances of a world he did not make and could not control.

The punishment they suffer in spite of all their efforts is out of all proportion to what they deserve, and in the case of Mary, who is the central figure of the tragedy; the suffering is a mockery of a divine plan in the world. The tragedy of the play lies in the realization of man’s powerlessness to deal with life in any way that would indicate a universal good. He stumbles in the fog, that

in this play is the dominate atmosphere, seeking for a pathway that is not there. Dislike the fate in Greek time, O’Neill’s characters’ fate is haunted by past which inevitably influences present and foreshadow future.

Past can be regarded as the frame motif into which others are placed. They are all having their roots in the family’s past. Throughout the play, the characters are unable to break its grip and move onward. They are trapped in a vicious circle and their actions are only repeating themselves. They have no courage to face their dead because their dead are in fact themselves, stuck in the past. Each of the characters has his version of a better past which is highly idealized, but also there is a dark side to their past which they can’t forget and forgive.

This is what prevents them from ever moving on with their lives and causes tragedy. In Long Day’s Journey into Night, the Tyrone family is in a prison of its own making. There have been so many events in the past that have had such a traumatic cumulative effect on them that the shadow of the past extends into the present and the future. The most tragic side to Tyrone’s past is his childhood which compels him to be a miser and also makes him a machine devoid of feelings for home and family. None of the characters is holding so much to the past as Mary, and indeed, none of them has as much reasons as she does to do so.

In her vision of the bright past, she is a young girl in a

covenant and a talent pianist. When she got married, she was happy for a time, but she never had a home with Tyrone. She hates him for that and for hiring a cheap doctor and for wanting another child after the death of baby Eugene. She also can’t forgive Jamie, because she believes that he killed Eugene. Only when she is on morphine, she expresses her true thoughts- Tyrone: “Mary, forget the past! ” Mary: “Why? How can I? The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future too. We all try to lie out of it, but life won’t let us’’.

When she talks about Jamie, she says-“He can’t help being what the past has made him. ” In the end of the play, Mary’s only response to her situation is to sink deeper and deeper into the past, as if she is in a kind of sad dream. Jamie is also haunted by his past and the idea of his mother’s Renaissance 5/6 addiction, for which he blames Edmund, but he doesn’t realize it might be his fault because he might have killed Eugene. From these points, we come to know that instead of escaping from the past, they escape into it. And as Mary says they can’t go on because too many promises have been broken.

Beside the past determinism, O’Neill also takes the loss of value, faith, dignity as a factor of the tragic vision of the hero and the modern human. All the four characters’ tragedies are caused by loss of faith, artistic faith, meaning of life and psychological pillar. They restored to different means to alleviate

pains, but their attempts are futile efforts. In the play, Mary at first gives up her devotion to God and her spiritual faith in God gives way to her pursuit of happiness in marriage life which eventually leads her to loss of faith in God and life. For Mary, God had been dead from her marriage.

When she lost her second children Eugene and injected drugs, it marks the total break with religion. Her tragic fate is led by loss of religious belief as well as the inner core of existence. I think Tyrone is a pitiable figure as well. He sacrifices his artistic talent for commercial success. The imprint of childhood poverty and the suffering experience had caused his obsession of materialism. He admits to Edmund that his love of money ruined his career as an actor. While bringing him the “great money success’’-the tragedy reduces him to a victim of materialism.

The loss of artistic faith rings him regrets and pain. Jamie’s loss is complicated that he lost his psychological pillar. He found his solace in alcohol and prostitutes. Jamie’s plight related to his attachment to his mother and the shock of discovering her addiction. He was known about it 10years longer than Edmund has, which means he is discovered it when he was an adolescent. It’s likely that his failure in school can be attributed to the shock of catching his mother in the act of injecting herself with morphine. This must have been a shattering experience that destroyed his belief in his mother’s purity.

He also hates Edmund because “it was your being born that started Mama on

dope’. From O’Neill we get the viewpoint that all the characters try to avoid the harsh reality and stay in the world of illusion. The characters’ separation from reality is another prominent factor in O’Neill’s concept of tragic vision. The theme of alienation is also protected through the title of the play and the symbols used in it. The title is very suggestive. It signifies the characters’ separation from reality. It’s not a forward journey but a journey in the backward journey, especially for Mary.

For her, it is a sad journey into the fog of dope and dream which clearly separates her from reality. For Jamie, it is a hopeless journey into the night of cynicism and frustration. For him, it begins and ends in darkness, offering him nothing to soothe his agitated mind. For James, it’s a tragic journey down the wrong road, away from his earlier commercial triumph. And for Edmund, it’s a journey beyond the night in a hopeful state of unreality. In the play, fog and foghorn also convey the same meaning of isolation and separation.

Here they represent a) the efforts of the family members to hide their faults. b) The daze of the drug addicted mind c) The wall of ignorance that separates family members from one another and Renaissance 6/6 from truth. d) The hazy distant past. e) Fog density suggests the family crisis. Mary says that she loves fog because “it hides you from the world and the world from you’’, but she hates the foghorn because ‘’they warn you and call you back’’. These symbols in the play appear that none of them

can do or say anything without hurting the others, usually on purpose.

For O’Neill, the tragic vision is optimistic, demonstrating “the indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity. As men are helpless before heredity and circumstances, they cannot forget but at least forgive. Forgiveness is the other pivotal theme of the play. Among four Thrones only Edmund is able to make peace with his past and move on to what we know will be a brilliant career.

The four Tyrones are deeply disturbing human. They have their jealousies and hatreds; they also remain a family, with all the normal bonds of love, however troubled, that being a family entails. At the ast part, Edmund is able to forgive and understand all of the Tyrones, including himself. In a nutshell we can say that O’Neill is smart enough to show his concept of tragic vision through the very title of the play.

A journey indicates movement from hope (day) into despair (night). And night refers not only to the opposite of day but also in a spiritual sense to ignorance, gloom, and painful confusion (such as the dark night of the soul). Also the past, external forces i. e. heredity and environment, naturalism, nihilism, pessimism, loss of faith, behaviorism etc dominate the tragic vision in O’Neill’s plays.