Study On The Image Of Sailors In Eugene O’neill’s Drama

Eugene O’Neill is the founder of American national drama,who integrated his own experience into works and created a huge number of distinctive sailor images,which is of vital importance to study the psychological process and emotional changes of O’Neill’s.The academic researchers now mainly focused on the personal pessimism,some degree of tragedy and the female figures revealed in O’Neill’s plays.Yet hardly any of researches concentrate on the theme of masculine character.To fill the gap in the academic field,the paper centered on the plays written by O’Neill to analyze the images and character features of the sailor to understand his caring towards groups of figures and thoughts of the dilemma of entire human race.The first chapter is about the introduction of sailor figure from three different life periods of O’Neill.Firstly,the paper examples on the Glencairn Plays to unfold the analysis of romantic sailor figures at O’Neill’s early one-act play time.Secondly,“rebellion” of the sailor was emphasized during productions in the middle of his career,such as Anna Christie.Thirdly,O’Neill went back to realism and took Long Day’s Journey into Night as an example featuring some poetic sailors.Chapter two is mainly focused on personality and characteristic of the sailor.To begin with,the first section is around primitiveness of sailors who are simple,not pretentious but rough and rude.Besides,the second section started with their inner struggle of ambivalence.On the one hand,the sailors are longing for freedom and obsessed with adventurous life on the sea but are also yearning for tranquil and peaceful land.Lastly,the third section analyze the tragic characteristics of these “tragic heroes”,who can nether control their own fates nor find forever home in spiritual world.Chapter three goes in depth of the meaning behind the figure of sailor.First,this figure,to a great extent,is O’Neill himself,and his self-searching process especially in later works.Second,the writer tried to express the metaphor and symbol of survival dilemma from entire human race,according to the discussions of the relationship between person to person,and people with the sea.