Eugene ONeills Long Days Journey into Night Essay -- Long Days Jou

Eugene ONeills Long sidereal days Journey into darkAs the murk desc dismisss around the Tyrones summer home, another fog falls on the family within. This fog is that of spunk abuse, in which each of the four main characters of Eugene ONeills play, Long Days Journey into Night face by the end of Act IV. Long Days Journey into Night is a metaphoric representation of the path from normalcy to demise by showing the general effects of substance abuse on human psychology and family dysfunctions through the characters Mary, Jamie, Edmund and Tyrone. Mary Tyrone makes the transition most clearly throughout the entire play. In Act I, her hands feed restlessly, and she seems to be quite nervous. When she appears in Act II one notices no change except that she appears to be less nervous, but then one becomes alive(predicate) that her eyes are brighter and there is a peculiar detachment in her voice and manner (ONeill 58). These subtle signs of her recur back to chemical dependency gall op until the final scene, where she is most obviously under the influences of a chemical substance. The morphine seems to make her reminiscent of the past. In Act III, she talked about her two childhood dreams of get a concert pianist or a nun. By Act IV, she has dragged her old wedding dress from the attic and attempted to play the piano again. This presents a psychological reasoning for her relapses. She considers herself to be growing old and ugly, and often refers to the how she was at one sentence young and beautiful. To her, the ugliness of the hands is the ugliness of what she has become everyplace the last twenty-five years, which is why she uses the pain of the rheumatism in them as her reason for the morphine (Chabrowe 181). Thus, it can be correlated that at one time she used the morphine to escape pain, and when she realized that it made her feel youthful again she became addicted.Her failure to desist is also connected with her interfamily relationships. When she was accused of relapsing she said, It would lot all of you right if it was true (ONeill 47) This suggests that she is seeking justification to continue her drug addiction by using her familys suspicions as a reason to relapse (Bloom 163). Not only are her actions influenced by her family, but they also influence the men, namely Edmund. He is quite aware of his diminishing health, and suspects that he ... ...with a sensation of what the future holds for the Tyrone family, the book tends to be repetitive. Thus, one can assume that the play marks one day, one relapse for Mary, one trip for Jamie to the whorehouse, one more than drink Edmund takes to forget the past, and one more drink that Tyrone takes to help himself cope. Yet, it will not be the first, or the last. It will be just one more. Night will journey into morning and it will all happen again. Such is tragedy.Works CitedAmerican Lung Association. Who Gets It. Tuberculosis (TB.) On-line. Internet. 1 March 2001. lendable <a href=http//www.lungusa.org/diseases/lungtb.html>http//www.lungusa.org/diseases/lungtb.htmlChabrowe, Leonard. Rituals and Pathos The Theatre of ONeill. Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism.Bloom, Steven F. Empty Bottles, Empty Dreams ONeills Use of Drinking and Alcoholism in Long Days Journey Into Night. Critical Essays on Eugene ONeill. 1984 ed.Collins, R. Lorraine, Kenneth E. Leonard, and John S. Searles. Alcohol and the Family. New York, London The Guilford Press, 1974.Hinden, Michael. Long Days Journey into Night native Eloquence. Boston Twane Publishers, 1990.