The decline of the family is a primary theme in both Eugene O'Neill's drama Long Day's Journey into Night and William Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury, and in each case the theme is linked to a general decline in society at large. For Faulkner, this decline is inextricably linked with the fact of slavery in the South and its aftermath, while for O'Neill the decline is bound with the failure of the Irish-Catholicism of New England. The Compson family was once a proud and patrician southern landholding family which has deteriorated now into madness, moral decay, and greed, while the Tyrone family similarly exhibits the worst of modern civilization. In both stories, money has become the new god of society, to the detriment of the ties of family.
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 not merely with the weather. The foghorn is a warning, and the audience feels that it has been warned to watch for the fog hanging over this family.
Jamie and Edmund are discussed before they actually appear, and the tension that exists between father and sons is evident. The parents are apparently concerned about Edmund's health--he is the younger of the two sons--and Mary treats Jamie as if he were still a child, though he is actually 34 years old. Jam...