ie is described as good looking despite "marks of dissipation," with a countenance that has a "Mephistophelian cast." Edmund looks more like his mother and is in poor health. The atmosphere becomes tense with the entrance of the two sons, showing that this is a family with inner problems and old animosities.
Long Day's Journey into Night exemplifies one of O'Neill's attempts to reveal the struggle of the human being against the mysterious forces shaping existence and limiting individual action, forces that in an earlier era were placed in the heavens, in the hands of the gods: "O'Neill's ultimate purpose was to achieve an effect in the modern theater like that in the ancient Athenian" (Chabrowe xvi). O'Neill's approach to tragedy was greatly influenced by Freud and Jung, and to a lesser extent Schopenhauer. In his early work, O'Neill had only an intuition of what tragedy was based on Nietzsche and the Greeks. In the Greek conception, fatalism was seen in the inevitability of defeat, and it was this that made the struggle tragic. The human being possessed free will and so could fight against fate, but it was not possible to escape it, for this fate was divinely imposed. O'Neill wanted to find a source for this inevitability for a modern audience that did not believe in the gods or in supernatural retribution. He found that source in Schopenhauer:
Man was controlled by an irrational force that was neither understood nor perceived, a universal will without purpose other than to perpetuate itself, a ceaselessly striving energy that beguiled the individual into doings its work with illusions of personal happiness, then destroyed him through frustration and waste (Chabrowe xxi).
Still, O'Neill needed more than a philosophical equivalent--he needed a dramatic equivalent, and he found it in Freudian and Jungian theories of psychoanalysis, especially in their deterministic aspects and their concepts of ambivalence, revealed ...