"Long Day's Journey Into Night"

Paper Summary:

In the play "A Long Day's Journey Into Night", Eugene O'Neill uses fog imagery to suggest that motivations and secret (offstage) lives of each character is partially obscured because each character refuses to really see or hear the others' stories. The paper shows that this refusal to pay attention symbolizes the repeated blame, contempt and self-deception each character practices to deny his or her own complicity in the failure of his or her dreams. Fog is an apt metaphor for this family trait because through fog one can see the general shapes or outlines of things, but the details and the substance of things is mostly hidden. In the paper, the themes of inability to empathize and blame are also explored to varying degrees in O'Neill's plays "Desire Under the Elms" and "Strange Interlude", but arguably the literary techniques employed by O'Neill in "Long Day's Journey" more effectively exploit the dramatic tension these themes create.

From the Paper:

"By Act III, fog has rolled in and a foghorn sounds offstage. In response to Mary's complaint about the foghorn, Cathleen agrees that it sounds like a "banshee." (98). The Oxford English Dictionary defines a banshee is a supernatural being supposed by Irish peasantry to wail under the windows of a house where "one of the inmates is about to die." With the metaphorical equation of foghorn (which is heard off-stage) and banshee, O'Neill foreshadows the literal death by consumption of Edmund and probably of Mary's whose morphine addiction returns by the end of the day. Both of these deaths will occur offstage, somewhere outside the scope of the play."

More papers on "Long Day's Journey Into Night":

• Essay # 44372 : "Long Day's Journey Into Night"
• Essay # 33845 : "Eugene O'Neil's "Long Day's Journey Into Night"
• Book Review # 92226 : "Eugene O'Neil's "Long Day's Journey into Night"
• Book Review # 92958 : "Mary's Isolation in "Long Day's Journey Into Night"

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