Theme Analysis

Themes
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Denial and Self-Delusion
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When the four members of the Tyrone family are sober, they generally refuse to
acknowledge their own failures and weaknesses. Instead, they deny their faults
altogether, choosing to blame another family member for them or to argue that they
are victims of uncontrollable circumstances. Their self-delusions lead to petty
bickering and raging arguments, often punctuated with insulting language. To
escape discord and avoid facing their failures, they take refuge in liquor or, in the
case of Mary, morphine. Under the influence of drugs, they tend to probe the past
and ruminate over what could have been or should have been. Oddly, when they
are primed with the artificial courage of their drug of choice, they sometimes own
up to their flaws or forgive others for theirs. But such conversational benefactions
are almost always negated by renewed verbal warfare. Unfortunately, no one
seems willing to take the necessary measures to overcome addiction, although
Jamie says he might have been inclined to seek help if his mother had set an
example of sobriety. But, of course, his sincerity here is suspect, for he is refusing
to take responsibility for his behavior. In effect, he is saying that he is still a drunk
because his mother is still a morphine addict. And so the family self-destructs. At
the end of the play, each member of the family is an alien in a familiar world; the
Tyrones live together separately.  
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The Haunting Presence of the Past 
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Mary continually dwells on the past. She could have been a nun, she says, or a
concert pianist, and she ruminates over the circumstances leading to the death of
Eugene. She also regrets leaving the good home provided by her father to marry a
traveling actor. Jamie, Edmund, and Mary frequently mock penny-pinching James
Tyrone for engaging a “quack” who prescribed morphine to alleviate Mary’s pain
when she was giving birth to Edmund. Tyrone criticizes Jamie for his ne’er-do-well
past and for setting a bad example for Edmund. Meanwhile, Edmund feels guilty
about his birth, for it was the indirect cause of his mother’s addiction. Mary sums up
the situation with this memorable line: “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the
future, too.” 
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The Destructive Power of Addictions
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All of the Tyrones depend on drugs to escape their problems. James, Jamie, and
Edmund take refuge in alcohol and Mary in morphine. But instead of alleviating
their problems, the drugs exacerbate them. 
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Loss of Faith  
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The Tyrones lose faith in themselves and in the future. At times they act as if
inexorable forces—like the Fates or the Furies in ancient Greek drama—are at
work against them. In addition, Jamie and Edmund lose faith in God and their
religion, partly because it is the religion of their father. Tyrone himself is a lukewarm
Catholic and Mary, a lapsed Catholic. 

The Prison of the Past

The Tyrone family is in a prison of its own making. There have been so many
events in the past that have had such a traumatic cumulative effect on them that
the shadow of the past extends into the present and the future. It seems as if
almost everything they say to each other is colored-poisoned, it might be said-by
something bad that has happened in the past, whether it is the numerous examples
of Tyrone's miserliness, or the corrosive effects of Mary's addiction, or Jamie's
laziness and drunkenness. The family is like a cart stuck in a ditch.

The prison of the past is all the more tragic because the play shows not only the
behaviors that led them into their current situation, but also what each of the
Tyrones might have been had life taken a different course, had the prison walls not
been built. As a young girl, for example, Mary had innocence, romantic ideals, and
a strong religious faith centered on the Virgin Mary. That faith disappeared early in
her marriage, and she desperately wants to rekindle it, because that would offer a
way out of the prison. The Virgin can offer divine forgiveness, whereas for humans,
forgiveness does not come so easily. In the end, Mary's only response to her
situation is to sink deeper and deeper into the past, as if she is in a kind of sad
dream.

Like Mary, Tyrone was quite different as a young man. He seemed to be on the
threshold of a brilliant career, when he was inspired by Shakespeare's plays and
praised by the great actor Edmund Booth for his performance as Othello. But he
allowed his miserliness, his materialism and his drinking to dominate his
personality, and before he realized what was happening, life began to turn sour for
him. Tyrone's attitude to the prison of the past is to escape it through drink, which is
the same attitude Jamie has. Even Jamie, the most cynical character in the play,
had talent and enthusiasm once. It was he who first encouraged Edmund to take an
interest in poetry, and he can still recite long passages of poetry himself. But for
him, the prison walls descended when he first realized that his mother was a drug
addict. He has no hope of escaping what the past has done to him.

Of the four characters, only Edmund has a chance of escaping from the prison. The
key moment comes in Act 4, when he recalls the mystical experiences he had
when he was at sea. These experiences gave him insight into the ultimate reality of
life, a peace, joy and unity utterly beyond the normal range of human
understanding. Although he has not been able to recapture those moments, he is
resolved to try, in his creative work, to express them. As he says to his father, he
will never a real poet:

I couldn't touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That's the best I'll
ever do. . . . Well, it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native
eloquence of us fog people.

Edmund is aware of his limitations, but he is committed to making the effort to

faithfully record the reality of things as he experiences them, even though he knows
he will never feel at home in life and "must always be a little in love with death." It
is, in his own way, a heroic stance. Edmund is committed to the future, to escaping
the prison of the past.

1. How much of Long Day's Journey Into Night is autobiographical?

The play is a portrait of O'Neill's own family. Many but not all of the details correspond
exactly. O'Neill's father, James O'Neill, was, like Tyrone in the play, the son of an Irish
immigrant. He was also an accomplished actor who was famous for his role as the
Count in The Count of Monte Cristo, which in the play Tyrone refers to (without naming
it) as bringing him financial success but artistic sterility. O'Neill's mother, Ellen Quinlan
O'Neill was, like Mary Tyrone, educated in a convent. She later became addicted to
morphine, which became a source of emotional pain to Eugene O'Neill (as it is to
Edmund in the play). As in the play, O'Neill's brother, Jamie, was an alcoholic, who
would die of alcoholism in 1923. The character of Edmund is based on O'Neill himself.
Like Edmund, O'Neill was a rebellious, turbulent young man who sailed to Argentina
and lived rough there. Also like Edmund, he later tried to commit suicide, and in 1912
he got a job on a local newspaper. He also contracted tuberculosis and was sent to a
private sanatorium, where the illness was cured.

However, in spite of the real-life basis of the characters, biographers point out that
O'Neill is not always strictly accurate in the details. Like any creative artist, he shapes
his materials to produce the best dramatic effect and also to convey a psychological, if
not always literal, truth.

In the play, Tyrone's miserliness is exaggerated. In fact, he adored his wife and did his
best to provide for her comfort, in spite of the fact that his profession demanded that
they travel a lot and live in hotels. On one occasion, far from calling in the services of a
cheap "quack" when his wife became ill (as Tyrone is accused of) James O'Neill took
her to a famous specialist in Europe, who successfully treated her. It is also
considered unlikely that Ellen O'Neill became addicted to morphine as a result of
giving birth to Eugene. Also, by 1912, the year in which the play is set, O'Neill had
already been married and divorced, which is not a part of Edmund's biography in the
play, perhaps because it would needlessly complicate the dramatic situation.

2. Describe how the past dominates the present in the play, and the
consequences this has for the characters.
"Well, you know how it is, I can't forget the past," says Jamie in Act 1. He is talking
about his mother's long history of drug addiction, but the comment has a wider
significance. Almost every interaction the family has during its long day's journey into
night is affected or shaped in some way by the past. As Mary puts it, "The past is the
present, isn't it? It's the future, too" (Act 2, scene 2). Much of the play is devoted to
dramatizing how this situation came about. Tyrone's miserliness is responsible for
much of it, and this is a recurring pattern. Just as Mary's drug addiction began as a
result of Tyrone's unwillingness to pay for a competent doctor, so Edmund's life is
imperiled by Tyrone's attempt to send him to a state sanatorium just to save money.

There are other recurring patterns. Mary tries, not for the first time, to break her
addiction, but she slides back into it. Jamie has never got beyond the habit of
drunkenness he acquired from his father at an early age. Even Edmund's consumption
is in a sense a repeated pattern, since Mary's father died of the same disease. All the
arguments and accusations in the Tyrone household have been heard again and
again, as Jamie's comment in Act 1 reveals: "I could see that line coming! God, how
many thousand times-!"

Because the troubles of the present are so deeply rooted in the past there is little
forward movement in the play. The past exerts such a powerful grip that the characters
believe there is little point in trying to change their situation. They best they can
advocate is passive acceptance. "All we can do is try to be resigned-again" (Act 4)
Tyrone says of his wife's addiction.

In the case of Mary, the past finally wins in an almost literal sense, since she
regresses to her girlhood at the convent and shuts out the present. There is no future
for her, or for Tyrone or Jamie. Only Edmund shows signs of being able to break out of
the binding grip of the past.

3. What are the main flaws of each character? In what sense might each be
described as both victim and victimizer?
Tyrone's main flaw is his miserliness. He values money too much, as can be seen by
his career, in which he preferred to make easy money acting in a popular play rather
than pursue true artistic excellence. His miserliness is a blight on the family,
culminating in his desire to send the sick Edmund to a state sanatorium just to save
money. But Tyrone is was a victim, since his father deserted the family when Tyrone
was a boy, and at the age of ten he was sent to work long hours in a machine shop.
The family was always poor, so Tyrone's attitude to money was formed early and is
easily understandable.

Mary's principle flaw is her inability to face up to reality, which is illustrated in her
denial that Edmund is seriously ill. This flaw leads to her drug addiction, since the drug
takes her into a kind of dreamy world of the past. Mary is also full of resentment about
her life, for which she is quick to blame Tyrone. But she too is a victim. Educated in a
convent, she was an innocent girl of eighteen when she married Tyrone. As his wife,
she had to endure his drinking and his miserliness. The latter led directly, in her view,
to her addiction, since Tyrone would only pay for a cheap doctor to treat her when she
was sick after the birth of Edmund, and it was that doctor who prescribed morphine.

Jamie's fault is his cynicism. As his mother and father often point out, he is always
ready to see the worst in people and he acts like a Mephistopheles figure to his
younger brother, tempting him to lead a destructive lifestyle. Jamie has no aim in life
other than to drink and spend time in brothels. But he is a victim in the sense that his
father, who was always drinking too much, set him a bad example. As Mary says to
Tyrone, "You brought him up to be a boozer" (Act 3).

Edmund is the only character who is presented without a major flaw other than his
physical frailty and his sickness. To an extent, Edmund shares Jamie's cynicism, but
he is also a seeker after truth, with a restless intellect and a poetic sensibility. Like his
brother, he is a victim of the family into which he was born, and he also has to live with
the belief that it was his birth that caused his mother's addiction.

4. Discuss the significance of Edmund's speech to his father about his

experiences at sea.
In Act 4, Edmund confides in his father about what he experienced at sea when he
was sailing for Buenos Aires. Lying down on deck at night under moonlight, listening to
the sound of the water and looking up at the white sails, he felt he was completely in
harmony with nature. More than that, he seemed to lose himself altogether. He
"dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and
rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky!" The experience
was of peace, unity and joy, as if there were no past and no future; he was living in the
eternal moment of now. Edmund also says that he experienced this spiritual ecstasy
again, also when he was at sea. He describes it as "the end of the quest, the last
harbor," so far beyond the pettiness of all the usual human hopes, fears and dreams.
The same experience had come to him several other times in his life, when he was
swimming or lying on a beach. It came only when he was in the presence of nature,
and always when he was alone, with nobody in sight.

This significance of these deep spiritual experiences is that for the first time Edmund
finds meaning in his life. His life had always been troubled; he was restless and had
once tried to commit suicide, but this experience seemed to take him outside of time
altogether, which means beyond the past. No wonder he treasured it so much, since
the life of the Tyrone family is so trapped in the past. Their past dictates their present,
and there is no way, as the play demonstrates, that they can escape from it. Yet here
is a moment when Edmund, so to speak, steps into freedom. He is no longer bound by
the past, no longer condemned to play out the conflicts of the past in the present and
the future. It is not surprising that he feels he has discovered the secret of life, and
describes the experience as a "saint's vision of beatitude." The problem is, of course,
that the experience was fleeting. Edmund could not live permanently in that state of
freedom, but at least he had glimpsed it, and it expanded his vision of what life could
be.

5. Why has Jamie wasted his life?

Mary believes that Jamie had made nothing of his life because of the bad influence of
his father. As a boy, Jamie was clever and excelled at school. But Tyrone "brought him
up to be a boozer," even giving him whiskey as medicine when he was a child. Tyrone
denies Mary's accusation, but never in the play does he show any interest in
examining the causes of Jamie's decline. He simply regards him as an ungrateful
"drunken loafer" who has wasted all the money his father spent on his education and
squandered all his opportunities.

But Jamie himself has a deeper understanding of the causes of his plight, which relate
to his attachment to his mother and the shock of discovering her addiction. He has
known about it ten years longer than Edmund has, which means he first discovered it
when he was an adolescent. It is likely that his failure in school can be attributed to the
shock of catching his mother in the act of injecting herself with morphine. He found it
repulsive. "Christ, I'd never dreamed before that any women but whores took dope!"
he tells Edmund in Act 4. This must have been a shattering experience that destroyed
his belief in his mother's purity. It is the key to the abusive language he uses about
her, as when he calls her "hophead," for example.

Jamie remains so attached to his mother and so distressed by what happened to her
that he even hates Edmund because "it was your being born that started Mama on
dope." His unresolved deep feelings about his mother also ensure that he is the first in
the family to suspect that she has relapsed, and the first to confront her directly about
it. The issue is so important to him, so vitally bound up with his own problems in life,
that when he discovers that Mary has not beaten the addiction, in spite of his belief
that she would, he is devastated. "It meant so much," he says to Edmund in Act 4. "I'd
begun to hope, if she'd beaten the game, I could, too." The fact that she has not
means that there is no hope for him either.