ach character blames everything on someone or something else. This idea brings the reader back to the idea about escaping the past.O’Neill’s play dramatizes moments of both anguish and love. The focus on character and the priority he assigns to memory delivers the emotional power of the play. The action is largely retrospective, and contrasts a dynamic and continually influential past with a present void of possibilities. The play depends greatly on alcohol consumption. As the characters get increasingly intoxicated throughout the play their inhibitions are lowered and they reveal their inner most selves. The play proceeds as the characters struggle to confront the past, whether by denial of responsibility for it, reconstruction of it, or confession of it. The alcohol and drugs serve as an escape for the characters from their pasts and the effect that the past has on the future and present. In a conversation with Mary and Edmund about Edmund’s illness, Edmund says, “Listen, Mama! You’re not so far gone yet that you’ve forgotten everything. You haven’t found out what I found out this afternoon. Don’t you give a damn?” (Baym 1338). O’Neill had tried the same approach to forget the past until drinking his way to tuberculosis. O’Neill stresses the importance of responsibility as well in this play. When arguing with her husband about having to live in cheap hotels, Mary apologizes for recalling the dark past: “No, dear. But I forgive. I always forgive you. So, don’t look so guilty. I’m sorry I remembered out loud. I don’t want to be sad, or to make you sad. I want to remember only the happy parts of the past” (Baym 1336). What the characters do not realize is that the only way to overcome the past is by remembering and learning from it. O’Neill faced this same dilemma until writing the play. By writing his familyR...
