Pursuit Of Meaning--A Study Of The Later Plays Of Eugene O'Neill

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (1888-1953), a well-known American playwright, is celebrated for his depiction of the universal plight of modern man as well as for his innovation of theatrical techniques in playwriting. He is a very autobiographical playwright. His own family tragedy and his early dissolute life familiarize himself with a group of pitiful misfits, which illuminates him to create in his works a world of characters similarly afflicted. Haunted by all the past ghosts, Eugene O'Neill, throughout his life, searched gropingly the spiritual consolation for human's survival. It is a hopeless hope in Beyond the Horizon; it is the religious love in Days without End and it is mutual understanding and forgiveness in Oh, Wilderness. As he entered his later creative years, he developed the idea emphasized in Oh, Wilderness, with which he ended his quest. In his later plays (completed in 1939-1943) including The Iceman Cometh, Hughie, Long Day's Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten, he was devoted to portraying a complete picture of his old friends and acquaintances and his family members in his memory, in order to lay all of them rest through understanding and forgiveness. But their desperate infatuation with the past, their hopeless prospect for tomorrow, their evasion from life in drugs, alcohol and sex and their cry for a companionship of shared friends, are human's conditions in the modern world.This thesis is divided into five parts:The introduction part deals with the major concerns of this thesis. It also introduces the approach and method to be employed in this thesis.The three chapters focus on play analysis, and intend to reveal the deep structure and deeper meaning of each play, with the approach of A.J.Greimas' carre semantique. The first chapter analyzes The Iceman Cometh. This play depicts a group of down-and-outs in Harry Hope's saloon, modeled after the playwright's old friends, who do nothing but drinking and pipe dreaming. After character analysis itpoints out they are able to make a survival when inebriated in pipe dreams. If there are no pipe dreams left, one will be doomed to death.The second chapter centers on Hughie and Long Day's Journey into Night. The former highlights the importance of friendship and the latter, based on Eugene O'Neill's family, eulogizes the significance of familial companionship through listening to another one patiently.The third chapter concentrates on A Moon for the Misbegotten. As a loving tribute to Eugene O'Neill's brother James Jr. O' Neill, it lays the stress on the necessity for spiritual solace through forgiveness and understanding.The conclusion part reiterates Eugene O'Neill's persistence in nourishing life with meaning in his entire artistic career. In his later plays he indicates that, to sustain a meaningful life, pipe dreams and companionship are the essential means, and without them, one will have to belong to death.