FREE ESSAY ON LONG DAYS JOURNEY INTO NIGHT

LONG DAYS JOURNEY INTO NIGHT

It is understandable that so many people in our class did not find the last act of Eugene
O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night a satisfying one; there is no tidy ending, no
goodbye kisses or murder confessions; none of the charaters leave the stage with flowers
in their hands or with smiles on their faces and none of the characters give explanatory
monologues after the curtain falls, as we've become accustomed to by reading so much
Shakespeare. O'Neill, though, isn't Shakespeare and Long Days Journey Into Night is as
different from, say, A Midsummer's Night Dream or Twelfth Night than a pint of stout ale
is from a glass of light chardonney. It is because of the uniqueness of the play that the
final act is so fitting a conclusion, and it is because of the essence of the play that
there is closure in the final scene and it is because of hte nature of hte play that the
final act carries upon its shoulders as powerful an impact as any other ending put upon
an American stage.
The reason that many people did not find the end of hte play a real conclusion is because
of the fact that Long Day's Jounrey Into Night is not a play of action, like almost all
other plays are. It is set within a single room during the course of a single day, and it
consists mainly of long monologue and bitter banter rather than movement or plot
development, but there is a reason that O'Neill does this; his play is not one where
characters move from place to place and experience various dilemnas and need to work
their way out through the course of a beginning, middle and end. LDJIN is a play of
introspection, a play of confession, understanding and ultimately, a play of
understanding, and it is in the final act of the play that all of these elements are
worked out.
The Tyrone family is, as Edmund describes them, a family of fog people; through the first
three acts of hte play we see them hiding their true feelings and emotions from each
other from not each other but from themselves through a stammering which has developed
from many years of holding things back. Even Jamie, who is berated time and time again
for his loose tongue, stammers, as he has things that he has left unsaid and that no one
is really aware. In many ways, the first three acts of the play are little more than just
this - four characters stammering, letting emotions build themselves up inside of them;
the first three acts are a prelude to the drama that unfolds in the final act of the
play. In the beginnings of the play we are given the extreme circumstances surrounding
the family that day: Edmund is to be diagnosed with consumption, Mary is to fall deeper
and deeper into an addiction from which she supposedly recovered, and each of the
characters is to unravel under the strain that all the stammering has placed upon them.
We are given the impression that the events of the fourth act has never happened before;
for example, even though he has lived with his father for more than twenty years, Edmund
has never heard him speak the way he speaks to him in his final act, when his father
tells him of how miserable he is now and how he was so muh happier as a struggling, young
actor than as a commerial success. Up until the final act, Edmund has gone with Jamie and
fancied Tyrone as little more than a crabby old miser. It is in his saying, I'm glad you
told me that papa. I understand you much better now. that the essence of the final act,
and of the play, is best illustrated. This is a family of people once filled with
promise, ambition and hope but who now move along the stage like the emaciated phantoms
of hteir former selves. And none of them really understands why. Part of the reason that
Edmund has never heard his father speak of this is because his father himelf never really
realized the truth about what he's become and about what choices he has made; he has
known simply that he was miserable, but not why. It is not under the final hours of
perhaps the worst day of the family's history that the setting is set so that, with truly
nothing left to lose, truths can come out, and this, again, is what the play is about -
understanding, and the circumstances surrounding it. 
The play is a play about forgiveness, too, and in that since it is not entirely
depressing. (Using the previous example again) Tyrone is more or less vilified through
the first three acts of the play, and it is true that he is in some respects to blame for
many of the misfortunes that have befallen the family and his wife in particular. In his
last long monologue though, as he's speaking to Edmund, the audience comes to realize the
circumstances that have made him the way he is, and to begin to forgive the faults that
before seemed inexcusable and monstruous. He becomes human, as do all the characters.
Jamie, too, comes to really understand himself - through the play he wittily plays
himself up as something more than the loafer that he is. In the final act, though, he
finally realizes what it is that he has become - he has become little more than the lover
of the fat women in the hick-town hooker shop, as he says, and it is because of this that
we can begin to understand and forgive what he himself has just begun to understand; that
he is not the ol' pal to his brother that he says he is, but that he in fact has been
trying to destroy the promise that his brother has and that he, too, once possessed. It
was the common opinion of many of the people in the class that in the final act the
characters are pathetic. In many ways, however, it is not until the final act that the
characters become in some ways, as Jamie puts it, absolved of their sins. For the first
three acts they do little more than bicker, trading insult at every opportunity that
arises. In the final act, as the characters stop their stammering and speak, for the
first time, from their hearts, we come to understand what it is that has made them so
bitter and resentful towards one another, and it is here and through this understanding
that we can forgive each of them for what they've miserable, suffering people that
they've become.
Eugene O'Neill wrote the play in the later part of his life in many ways for this reason:
to forgive his family and absolve them from the harsh opinions which permeate his earlier
works. Forgiving is not an easy thing to do, though (O'Neill eludes to the pain it caused
to write LDJIN in his dedication), and, as a result, LDJIN is not an easy play to
understand or to sit through.