is past. O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey into Night serves as therapeutic for the dramatist’s life and an explication of his family’s story. His last wife, Carlotta Monterey O’Neill describes his approach to writing the play about his own family’s tragedy. She says that his past haunted him and that he was bedeviled into writing it. She explains that he needed to get it out of his system and to forgive whatever it was that caused this tragedy between himself and his mother and father (Szeliski 65). “I think he felt freer when he got it out of his system. It was his way of making peace with his family—and himself” (Szeliski 65). Eugene O’Neill can be best compared to the character of Edmund Tyrone. O’Neill along with Edmund grew up in hotels as his parents toured with the theater. He too used alcohol as an escape to reality and the past. After tuberculosis nearly killed him, he sobered up and decided to write plays. O’Neill brakes away from drama traditions and experimented by conveying emotions in his plays, opening a world of the mind, memories and fears. In A Long Day’s Journey into Night O’Neill dramatizes the complexity of family life. O’Neill writes the play with sympathy to all the characters of the play. “Each Tyrone was both a victim and oppressor, and none of them could escape” (Baym 1289). What this means is that each character is a victim of their past, but yet they do not do anything to reach success or to move on. Instead, each character goes to a drug to escape their misfortunes and pasts. In an argument about Jamie’s drinking problem Tyrone tells Mary: “So, I’m to blame because the lazy hulk has made a drunken loafer of himself? Is that what I came home to listen to? I might have known! When you have the poison in you, you want to blame everyone but yourself” (Baym 1335). E...
