17;s story with fictional characters, he is able to unleash his inner most feelings and aggression over the past. It allows him to understand his past and move on. Although O’Neill is able to move on, the characters of the play remain haunted by the past. The play depicts the aftermath and the continuing helplessness of despair and human failing (alcoholism, penury and addiction) on the “haunted” Tyron family. The ghost motif is used throughout the entire play representing the inescapable past. O’Neill refers to these ghosts often because he himself has had these same ghosts. The Tyrones are unable to come to terms with their true emotions or their memories, and their consequent rejection of responsibility of present actions. Through their conflicts and arguments the audience is able to see these hidden emotions. The play serves as O’Neills unmasking of his past. Each page unleashes his emotions of what he is feeling about his past. While describing the effects the play had on him Carlotta says, “…it was a most strange experience to watch that man being tortured every day by his own writing. He would come out of his study at the end of the day gaunt and sometimes weeping…I think he felt freer when he got it out of his system” (Szeliski). This freedom came from meeting the past face to face instead of letting it him haunt him again and again.The action of the play takes place in the audience mostly. The audience is constantly forced to alter his or her vision of the past, since the characters contradict each others’ stories in virtually every line of the dialogue. Mary’s version of her father’s comfortable home and of her longing to join a convent, for example, is the truth as Mary remembers it and as the audience first knows of it. Tyrone’s interpretation of her middle-class home as ordinary and his description of the young Mary as “a bit ...
