Eugene O'Neil Late Plays Existentialism

Whether we pull up a stool with the denizens of Harry Hope’s saloon in The Iceman Cometh or spend a haunted evening with the Tyrones in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, it is remarkable how much the modern drama of Eugene O’Neill’s later plays dramatize the theories and philosophies in the works of men like Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung. In large part this is due to O’Neill’s autobiographical dramatizations, ones that include painful delusion, escape from reality, shocking disclosure, and

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ing ‘really real,’ in the sense of being spiritually true, not meticulously lifelike” (Bogard and Bryer 161). Here we see the inability of many individuals to separate O’Neill’s use of real-life situations and real-life acquaintances from his dramatization of the more profound and universal experiences these situations touched off in him and in those around him. His ability to honestly share these subjective but intensely personal experiences provide us with valuable glimpses of insight into O’Neill’s own psyche and identity. At times, O’Neill himself can be viewed as someone who at times lost harmony with nature. If we touch for just a moment on two plays prior to the later plays that are the focus herein, we see O’Neill’s attempts to portray this torn against the self and others condition of modern materialistic, existential human existence. As Barrett H. Clark (82-83) notes, O’Neill was “…creating a form of propaganda in the sense that it was a symbol of a man who has lost his harmony with nature and trying to make peace with the world in which he finds himself.” As noted earlier in the later plays, O’Neill is concerned with a modern psychological assessment of fate. He did so earlier with Mourning Becomes Electra and
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Approximate Word count = 10698
Approximate Pages = 43 (250 words per page)