| Eugene O'Neill, the greatest American playwright, wrote more than 50 plays during his lifetime. People generally consider him as a tragedian, but during his long dramatic career, he not only matured as a dramatist, but also responded sensitively to the temper of his age. He spent two decades on the mission of reviving Greek Tragedy in modern times which was reflected in his earlier works. But gradually it began to dawn on him that it is impossible to write tragedy in such a discordant, meaningless and broken world. Tragedy, a mode of hero worship could not thrive in an age that takes delight in breaking idols. So his hope of tragedy died in modern times."In his disillusionment, O'Neill could only write what he saw. However, this powerfully-felt, unembellished vision, acquired at great personal cost to the playwright, which informs the subjects of all his late plays, makes them indisputable masterpieces."(1) As a matter of fact, what makes O'Neill immortal is precisely the fact that in the last phase of his dramatic career, he had captured the mood of his age by giving a truthful account of the modern people's absurdity, without bothering about tragic exultation.Thus it is impossible to use a generalized concept like tragedy to refer to all his plays, nor is it proper to call him a tragedian. So this paper tries to make a comparison between his earlier plays and late ones to show the evolution of his plays from tragedies to non-tragedies by using the tragedy theory of Whitney Jennings Oates. According to him, tragedy always makes certain assumptions. In the first place, it always seems to assume that man has a free will to choose his own actions and takes responsibility for his action. The second assumption is that over and above man there exists some superhuman force or power. The last assumption that tragedy seems consistently to make is the fundamental dignity and worth of man. Thus, the freedom of his will, the existence of a superhuman force and the dignity of man form the three elements of tragedy.So naturally this paper falls into three chapters, with each chapter corresponding to one of the three elements. Within each chapter, there is a contrast between his earlier works and late plays regarding one element of tragedy. Therefore, Chapter I is concerned with the first element: the exertion of free will. While in his earlier plays, there is always an exertion of free will by the tragic heroes, in his late works the most predominant feature of the characters is the loss of free will; Chapter II is related with the superhuman power. If in his earlier works the heroes are brought to destruction by a superhuman power like fate or God that is beyond their control, in his late works what we have is a Godless world where we do have fate, Kismet, but it is a negative fate, not the one in the Greek sense, for there is nothing mysterious about it. Under the working of such a fate, the moderns are placed in an undesirable position, the existentialist irony, where he can neither affirm nor break his pipedreams; Chapter III deals with the last element of tragedy, the dignity of man. In his earlier works, we can always feel a touch of human nobility in his reaction against fate and his willingness to assume responsibility, which arouses in us a feeling of admiration and wonder; in his late works man is an object of disgust, clinging for life to a pipedream which had unmanned him. Instead of seeing nobility stemming from perversity, what we view is absurdity lurking behind the heroic self-image. Thus we can not admire or wonder but we can understand and forgive.As O'Neill is a prolific writer with an output of more than 50 plays, it is impossible to cover every one of his plays in this thesis due to time and space limit. So 4 plays: Desire under the Elms(1924), Mourning Becomes Electra(1929-1931), The Iceman Cometh(1939) and Long Day's Journey into Night(1941) are chosen as the basis of textual analysis, with the first two representing his earlier plays and the rest standing for his late ones.
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