Approaching Eugene O’neill’s Later Plays From A Modern Tragicomic View

Eugene O’Neill contributes a lot to the development of American drama. As a talented playwright, O’Neill writes many great plays and makes American drama mature and reach the advanced world standard. Influenced by Ibsen and Strindberg, O’Neill dexterously combines the realistic writing styles with modern expressionistic techniques, thus making himself a master capable of writing in different dramatic forms. He produces21one-act plays,28multi-act plays all through his life, winning four Pulitzer Prizes and one Nobel Prize for Literature.Drama critics often label him as a master of tragedy for the great tragic power in his plays. However, I contend that O’Neill has attempted to innovate his theatrical skills in the later period. It is true that when writing his early and middle plays like Beyond the Horizon, The Emperor Jones, Mourning Becomes Electra etc, O’Neill, who believes that tragedy is the noblest and most inspiring form of drama, sharply demonstrates his tragic vision of life and human nature with his perfect tragic skills. Nevertheless, after12years’silence from the theatrical circle, O’Neill returns with his different plays: Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh and A Moon for the Misbegotten. In those plays, O’Neill extends his theatrical boundaries to tragi-comic genre and makes people laugh with tears and weep with laughter.Different from the classical tragicomedy, what O’Neill brings us is the modern tragicomedy. The World Wars, the economic recession and the rapid development of industrial revolution make people live in a society where the old tradition has been destroyed while the new one has not come into being. People are confused, uncertain and scared. So the traditional dramatic forms like tragedy, comedy or classical tragicomedy can never satisfy those modern dramatists who seek to express their understandings of human’s existence predicament. Sartre, Beauvior and Camus’s viewpoints about ambiguity and absurdity help bring the modern playwrights out of the quagmire. They find a new way to negotiate with the chaos of the world, that is, modern tragicomedy. They take advantage of comic or even grotesque techniques to illustrate the tragic essence, the distorted human nature and mixed emotional experiences.In Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh and A Moon for the Misbegotten, O’Neill centers on the themes of home finding, pipe dreams and forgiveness seeking to present the scenes of tragic-comic existence and show his concerns for the absence of faith and morality in life.