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Long Day's Journey Into Night

In an essay on Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, Travis Bogard says that "Art never holds a mirror up to nature. It edits, distorts, shapes so that the dramatist's sense of what the experience meant or could have meant can be discerned." O'Neill himself wrote, "Facts are facts, but the truth is beyond and outside them." This study will use the message of these two quotes as a jumping-off point to explore the relationship between "art" or "truth" and "nature" or "facts" as we find them in O'Neill's autobiographical play about his family. The study will consider the significance of the playwright's dedication to his wife, and will consider the characters of Mary, Edmund and Jamie in terms of the light they shed on these issues.

In his dedication to Carlotta, O'Neill calls the work "this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood" and says that he wrote the play "with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones" (7). Before we even begin the play, then, we are in the realm of conflict between "art" and "facts."

There is, in art, the desire and the opportunity to paint a picture of life which is more clear, more understandable, more loving, perhaps, than life itself usually is. This is not to say that O'Neill did not in reality come to such a state of forgiveness and understanding for his own family, including himself. He may well have. But it is to say that, once we read in the dedication the intention of O'Neill (to pity, forgive, understand), we cannot help but suspect that the play will be written in such a way that such an intention can be realized. That is, if O'Neill is bent on forgiving, he is more likely to edit out unforgivable acts committed by members of the Tyrone family, which represents O'Neill's own family. If he is bent on understanding, then he is more likely to keep in the play only those aspects of the family's relationships which can be understood on some signi...

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Long Day's Journey Into Night. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 13:19, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1708474.html