Decline of the Family Theme in 2 Works

In the beginning of Long Day's Journey into Night, we find ourselves in the living room of the Tyrone summer home on a morning in 1912. Over the course of the play, O'Neill reveals more and more about the characters of Mary and James Tyrone and their children, and the family solidarity that seems apparent at the beginning is only an illusion. The viewer can see within a short time that something is wrong, for James tells his wife that she must take care of herself and that it is wonderful to have her back, raising the question of where she has been. Several references are made to the foghorn which kept Mary up much of the night, a foghorn that seems as if it were signaling that something is wrong with the Tyrone family and

. . .
has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever (O'Neill 61). This is the view of the playwright as well, that there are forces outside ourselves that shape our lives and that the tragedy is that we can do nothing about it. The family in Long Day's Journey into Night is doomed from the start, and on this particular day we see the tensions and hatreds fueling their lives and pressing them toward the destruction that is inevitable and that has been shaped by forces greater than themselves. James Tyrone was shaped by his childhood and is now inflicting his own pain on the rest of his family. This play has long been recognized as autobiographical and as embodying O'Neill's view of his own father and the disintegration of his own family, and as presented in the play, this decay seems inevitable as the family is always undermined by forces older than the family and impervious to change. Similarly, William Faulkner portrays the decay of the Compson family as a representation of the disintegration of the family in modern society, as subject to external forces stronger t
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
James Tyrone, Dalton Ames, Benjy Benjy, William Faulkner, Quentin Jason's, Journey Night, Freudian Jungian, Greeks Greek, Jamie Edmund, O'Neill Faulkner, journey night, day's journey night, compson family, day's journey, james tyrone, moral code, dishonor family, family play, university press, family modern, code south,
Approximate Word count = 2272
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

More Essays on Decline of the Family Theme in 2 Works