cally, the characters escape from reality in a fog of memory, drug and alcohol abuse, and distorted perceptions of time and place. We will see this exemplified in O’Neill’s greatest tragic heroine, Mary Tyrone who basically functions in a dream-like world of memories and the fog of morphine addiction.
The tragedy in O’Neill’s later plays is that the characters cannot live their lives embracing the eternal recurrence concept because they are too busy trapped in escapism because they cannot recreate the “joy of living” now lost or never had. Unlike Nietzsche’s philosophy which is as brutally honest as Hickey in The Iceman Cometh but more optimistic than O’Neill’s truths, O’Neill’s characters cannot muster a will to being that allows them to embrace the reality in which they exist and remain responsible for on an individual basis. Influenced by Ibsen, Strindberg, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and others, O’Neill came to believe in the existence of a grea
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