A Harsh Journey In Search Of Identity

Searching for identity is a traditional and eternal literary theme, and many writers have shown great solicitude for the identity and reflected the theme of searching for man's identity in their works, among which Eugene Gladstone O'Neill, a famous American playwright, is an outstanding representative figure.As a sensitive playwright, deeply perceiving the alienation and the loss of identity, Eugene O'Neill endeavors to find an identity for the people under given historical conditions. As his works and life attest, O'Neill is a restless explorer whose concentration has never shifted away from the identity problem, which frustrates him as well as his contemporaries. In his two late plays—The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey into Night, together with his characters, O'Neill bends himself to the search for identity.The thesis intends to analyze O'Neill's two late plays to illustrate the alienation, the loss of identity and the harsh journey in search of identity with Marx's alienation theory and Freud's psychoanalytic approaches. The thesis is composed of four parts:Chapter One first briefly introduces Eugene O'Neill, including his living background, great influence of Nietzsche, Ibsen and Freud upon Eugene O'Neill, the three phases of his playwriting career, and his contribution to the American drama. Then it gives a general literary review of Eugene O'Neill and his plays, including the literary review on The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey into Night. At last, this chapter expounds the objective and significance of the thesis.Based on the theory of alienation proposed by Karl Marx and the theory of conscious and unconscious of Freudianism, Chapter Two analyzes the alienation and the loss of identity in the two plays. From the two plays, the thesis chooses three characters respectively to explicate the alienation and the loss of identity. Through the analysis of the dramatic conflicts in the two plays, the thesis probes into three kinds of alienations: the alienations between man and man, man and society, and the alienation between man and self. Then the thesis focuses on the loss of identity induced by the alienation.Chapter three focuses on the harsh journey in search of identity. The thesis takes two...