The Dionysian As Seen In Eugene O'Neill's Plays

Eugene (Gladstone) O'Neill (1888-1953) is one of the greatest American playwrights, contributed about 50 plays during his life career. He was rewarded Pulitzer Prizes for four times and was the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936.Born and grown up in a family with love-hate relationship, O'Neill is a man of introversion, sensitive and stubborn while possessing a high sense of the self. O'Neill deeply felt the sorrows and pains he had ever experienced and observed in this human life and society. The period in Gaylord farm for curing his tuberculosis, O'Neill found that he could be a creator instead of a destroyer. Later on, he devoted himself into play writing. This building of tragic pyramid is inspired and stimulated out of unyielding force behind life, an instinctive desire to express the hope under dark foil. Though his plays do not dramatize Nietzsche's philosophy, he has taken from his books, especially The Birth of Tragedy, the concept of the Apollonian and Dionysian duality, which is apparently displayed by images as the hard versus the soft, the material versus the spirit, the masculine versus the feminine, the masked versus the unmasked, the rational versus the irrational, the civilized versus the primitive and the disintegrated versus the compounded.As a modern tragedian, Eugene O'Neill persists in finding the force behind life. The ancient Greek tragic drama has profound influence on his creation in modern society. Many of his works focus on the entrapment of Fate of mankind. According to the different inclinations towards the embodiments of the Dionysian, the...