The Living Predicament Of The Modern Man

Eugene O'Neill is regarded as the founder of American modem tragedy in 20^th century, whose tragic theme has been a long-concerned topic for many scholars and critics. This paper illustrates the living predicament of the modern man on his most famous modern tragedy Long Day's Journey into Night.O'Neill devoted all his life to explore the "force behind the life" and to dig at the roots of the "sickness of today". He found that tragedy was caused by a fundamental conflict between the individual struggle for freedom from restraint and the suppression of these drives from society. The themes of his tragedies are more complex than the destiny theme of Greek tragedy. He made much use of the excellent Greek tragedies on the one hand and inserted the current problems of his days into his tragedies on the other hand. He maintained that tragic causes were from internal rather than external. So the author of the thesis analyses the predicament of the modern man in his tragedy Long Day's Journey into Night. The predicament is divided into three aspects from external to internal—the predicament of society, the predicament of psychology and the predicament of loss of sense of belonging.The thesis is composed of five parts.The introduction briefly introduces Eugene O'Neill's life and works especially his autobiographic tragedy Long Day's Journey into Night. It also introduces the literature review about the studies on Eugene O'Neill.Chapter 1 deals with the alienation of human relationships in the capitalized society. Because of the highly developed science and technology, industrialism became the dehumanizing power that threatened human existence. Westerners suffered from various spiritual crises because of the death of the Old God. O'Neill shows the alienation of human relationships in a love-hate family which is a small unit of society. The relationships between family members are alienated: victim and victimizer between husband and wife, the Oedipus complex between mother and sons, the hostility between father and sons and the love-hatred relationship between brothers. Chapter 2 discusses the modern man's sufferings in the inner world fiom a psychological point of view. O'Neill shows the inside sickness of the four Tyrones. They are all psychopaths who are wearing masks. Whenever anyone tries to see beneath their facades and discover their naked selves, they invariably resort to aggressiveness to defend themselves. They are trapped in their delusions: Mary has delusional schizophrenia; Tyrone has paranoid schizophrenia; Edmund has delusional personality disorder; James has alcoholism delusion. Through disclosing the modem man's sufferings in the inner world, O'Neill represents the spiritual crisis of the modern man.Chapter 3 focuses on the loss of sense of belonging of the modern man. The four Tyrones are trapped in the past and they lose their sense of belonging forever. The father cannot become a fine actor of a serious drama. All the morphine cannot help the mother regain her nun-like virginity nor relieve the rheumatism that prevents her fingers from playing the piano. Drinking only hastens the elder brother's premature alcoholic disintegration and intensifies the younger brother's acute sense of abandonment at a time in his own life when the onset of consumption makes him all the more vulnerable to depression. They lose all hope for life and future. It seems only death can give them peace and felicity.Finally, O'Neill, through the four Tyrones, depicts the plight of the modern man who has become dislocated, disillusioned, and destroyed by the highly technological world. For O'Neill, the modern man is doomed to suffer from loneliness and desperation. His tragedy results from the predicament in which the modern man thinks and expects there is a homeland—the spiritual salvation, the pursuit of affection in human nature or the indefinite thing which is "beyond-the-horizon", but he fails to find it, for there is no sense of belonging for the modern man. The four Tyrones extend their long day's spiritual exploration journey into midnight, into the past, even into their death.