that he is not a philosopher rather just a bum and one without hope. “By God there is no hope! I’ll never be success in the grandstand or anywhere else...I’ll be a week fool looking with pity at both sides of everything till the day I die”(O’Neil 726-727). Larry at last is desolate and broken for he does not have hope or truth, he has lost all. Larry, is in actuality a confession of O’Neil, “His works reveal the unsatisfied searching of a soul for truth”(David p11). His other great success was “A Long Day’s Journey into the Night.” This work brings about a look into the depression that was O’Neil’s life. The setting for this was his very childhood home in New London, “He revealed and analyzed the various tragedies of his family: his mother’s periodic dope addiction; his father’s sense of frustration at having been seduced from becoming a great Shakespearean actor by the financial lure of popular Monte Cristo; his older brother’s destructive and self-destructive traits which were later lead him to drink himself to death...obsession with guilt and sense of tragedy. A friend remarked “he had six senses, sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing, and tragedy.” The last was the most highly developed”(Raleigh p1). O’Neil was not using his writing to gain public recognition, rather, he was using it as an outlet for his own life. He wrote about his personal tragedy and his personal lose he just changed the names. “His chief aim was neither popular acclaim or success, nor even literary immortality, but his own salvation. Through his writings he sought to ease his inner pressures and storms, to justify himself to himself not to the world”(Shain p2). His themes were strongly positioned on the state of mankind being one of loneliness and alienation. He spoke of the natural struggles between the sexes and between famil...
