Critics

Question 1

Michael Hinden

drugs and alcohol

Answer 1

Recent medical research indicates that patients who are given
morphine solely to control pain rarely become addicted. This evidence tends to exonerate James Tyrone from Mary’s plight to addiction.

Question 2

Dr. Ronald Melzack

Drugs and alcohol

Answer 2

According to Dr. Ronald Melzack, “when patients take morphine to
combat pain, it is rare to see addiction…. Addiction seems to arise only in some fraction of morphine users who take the drug for its psychological effects, such as its ability to produce euphoria and relieve tension”

Only those who crave the drug’s mood-altering effects require ever
increasing doses for relief.

Question 3

Michael Hinden

drugs and alcohol

Answer 3

Ella O’Neill found God; her son found art.

Question 4

Travis Bogard

Reality and Fiction

Answer 4

Edmund is more than an imaginary figure. He is a figure from
history and one upon whose truth to life an audience has a right
to insist.

Question 5

Gerardine Meaney

Reality and Fiction

Answer 5

This extraordinary insistence that the play be subsidiary to a (bio
graphical) reality independent of it is the worst kind of literary
voyeurism: a demand on the writer to exhibit all his scars.

Question 6

Gerardine Meaney

Paralysis

Answer 6

Stasis and circularity are the very texture of the play. The
repetition reaches an apotheosis in the final scene, for this play does
not culminate in catharsis, nor even in destruction. It ends instead in a stasis which implies an inexorable continuity without change.

Question 7

Gerardine Meaney

autobiography, imposter syndrome, guilt

Answer 7

Shakespeare’s Edmund (King Lear) is the brilliant bastard, the original individualist, who is in every sense illegitimate. Edmund Tyrone is also
a usurper. He has taken the place of Eugene, the dead son of Mary
and Tyrone, and of the other absent Eugene, Eugene O’Neill, whose surrogate and distortion on stage he is.

Question 8

Gerardine Meaney

irony

Answer 8

Mary Tyrone denies her men the possibility of any sense of home

Question 9

Gerardine Meaney

comparison, quote significance (?)

Answer 9

The apparently innocuous quote by Jamie in the first act, “the
Moor, I know his trumpet”, identifies his father with the
jealous hero of Othello? This foreshadows Mary’s later accusation, “He’s been jealous of every one of my babies”.

The same quote identifies Jamie himself with lago. And of course in this scene it is Jamie who casts suspicion on Mary as lago on Desdemona. As it is lago who is truly jealous and a usurper so it is Jamie, too, who corrupts Edmund out of jealousy of his parents’ affections

Question 10

Gerardine Meaney

son on son conflict

Answer 10

His struggle for priority in an Oedipal conflict with his father is also a struggle for priority in a struggle with his literary fathers.

Question 11

Laurin Porter

Answer 11

Eugene O’Neill wrote Long Day’s Journey into Night, the play that
in some sense he had been preparing for his entire career, at the
peak of his artistic powers.

Question 12

Laurin Porter

isolation

Answer 12

The selection of allusions, their number, and the ways they are used, I will argue, function on a subtextual level to reinforce the fact of Mary’s isolation within the family unit as well as our awareness of it.

family doesnt talk to her in literary quotes

Question 13

Laurin Porter

isolation

Answer 13

It is an all-male club, and the literary references become, if you will, gendered language.

The allusions form a “language of kinship,” to borrow (and slightly re-interpret) Michael Manheim’s very useful term, making explicit what we sense when we watch the play: that Mary is at the same time paradoxically the sine qua non of the family? the “one thing needful” to all three men? and yet psychically isolated within the very family that depends on her.

It is also worth noting that though the piano may provide a means of
self-expression for Mary, her choice of music? Chopin waltzes? is by
definition word-less. In a very real way, language in this play belongs to the men; at the very least, they share a special coded language which excludes her.

Question 14

Laurin Porter

gender

Answer 14

She does not exist as an autonomous individual with the same access to agency and power that the men have. Rather, she is a product of the roles that society has bequeathed to her as wife and mother and is seen by her husband and sons through the lenses of their particular needs, a phenomenon which is reinforced both by gendered linguistic practices and the allocation of stage space.

Question 15

Laurin Porter

gender

Answer 15

Mary is constructed by the gaze of the men, a phenomenon which, like the gendered language and space of the play, helps account for Mary’s isolation and deep loneliness.

Question 16

McDonald

surveillance

Answer 16

calls LDJN a
“structure of watchers-being-watched”

Question 17

Laurin Porter

gender, isolation, surveillance

Answer 17

Selmon, drawing upon Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, describes the
Tyrone family dynamic as a panopticon.

T]he whole point of this arrangement was that the prisoners should know that they were being observed or, crucially, that they might being observed. This constant possibility is always present in the prisoner’s mind, and thus the force of discipline is no longer just “outside,” and capable of being avoided or hidden from, but “inside,” in the prisoner’s own mind.

Constructed by their gaze, aware of their constant surveillance, Mary is a prisoner in her own home. It is her husband and sons’ space, not hers, just as it is their language and their power.

Question 18

Normand Berlin

forgiveness

Answer 18

He wrote in his dedication to his wife Carlotta,”with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.” The
word “all” in the dedication indicates that in the act of writing
O’Neill is attempting to understand himself as well as his family
and to forgive himself and his family for the hell they created for
each other.

connection to no exit

Question 19

Carlotta O’Neill

Answer 19

“When he started Long Day’s Journey it was a most strange experience to watch that man being tortured every day by his own
writing. He would come out of the study at the end of a day gaunt and sometimes weeping. His eyes would be all red and he looked ten years older than when he went in in the morning.”

Question 20

Normand Berlin

autobiographical significance

Answer 20

What makes it the highest achievement in American theater is not its autobiographical aspect. It is what O’Neill’s dramatic art does to make it a self-contained work of art that can be appreciated without
knowledge of the dramatist’s personal life.

Question 21

Normand Berlin

shakespeare quote

Answer 21

Jamie is O’Neill’s Hamlet. Bitter and cynical, his whole life revolves
around the condition of his mother.

“mad scene enter ophelia” connects himself to hamlet

Question 22

Eugene O’Neill

autobiography

about Iceman Cometh; applicable to LDJN

Answer 22

“I knew ‘em all; I’ve known ‘em all for years. All these people I’ve written about I once knew.”

Question 23

Grant H. Redford

autobiography

Answer 23

That he drew on personal experience is true, but it is not true that the value of any of the plays depends on how closely they parallel that experience.

Question 24

Carlotta O’Neill

autobiography

Answer 24

“He explained that he had to write this play. He had to write it because it was a thing that haunted him. and he had to forgive whatever caused this in them [his mother, father, brother]
and in himself.”

After he had completed it, she writes, “he felt freer. It was his
way of making peace with his family, and himself.”

Question 25

Eugene O’Neill

love and forgiveness

autobiography

Answer 25

In his dedication of the play to her he says that her love had
enabled him “to face my dead at last and write this play-write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones”

Question 26

Eugene O’Neill

greed

James Tyrone

Answer 26

O’Neill once quoted from the New Testament to express this view-he was speaking specifically of the United States -“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul.”

According to Grant H. Redford in LDJ this theme, that devotion to
material things corrupts, is embodied in the father, James Tyrone.

Question 27

Bigsby

quotes allusions

Answer 27

Rather than speak their own lives they hide in the language of others

Question 28

Bogard

Answer 28

He (Tyrone) buys bad real estate to purchase the security he cannot find.

Question 29

Steven A Black

edmunds speeches about his trips and poetry

hope

Answer 29

We sense that he may well survive his consumption and find a more coherent way to live that the other Tyrone’s have found.

Question 30

Steven A. Black

hope

Answer 30

The hope we feel for Edmund is essential to our hunch that the play is tragic. Here is the great paradox of tragedy

Question 31

Tynan

autobiography

Answer 31

We are watching a crucial day in O’Neil’s late youth, covered with a thin gauze of fiction

Question 32

Downer

tragedy

Answer 32

‘Long Day’s Journey into Night is a tragedy, not because it obediently follows the precepts of Aristotle, but because it considers the possibilities for human failure in the pursuit of happiness, a way of life of which Aristotle never dreamed.’

Question 33

Stephen A. Black

Answer 33

The audience may easily overlook the character’s positive traits. ‘They are all highly intelligent, imaginative and sensitive, educated, skilled in logical analysis, often capable of deep and complex fellow-feeling.’

Question 34

Stephen A. Black

style of the play

Answer 34

The play’s action as a series of ‘quasi-judicial proceedings, in which accusations and denials are made, evidence is adduced’

Question 35

Fathima

tragedy

Answer 35

‘The Tyrone family suffers from what Freud called the pleasure principle’ (The tendency of people to seek pleasure and avoid pain, often at great lengths.)

Question 36

Meaney

intertextuality, allusions quotes

Answer 36

‘James Tyrone haunts, is the ghostly double of, the Shakespearian heroes he once played, but which his own ‘tragic flaw’, the greed bred by insecurity, has ensured he will never play again.’

Question 37

Katalin G. Kalay

tragedy, allusion quote

Answer 37

can the crisis and singular tragedy opening up, journeying
through the single day in August, 1912 till midnight be seen as a tragedy of letters?

Question 38

Katalin G. Kalay

shakespeare allusion

Answer 38

The picture of Shakespeare is decisive: on the one hand, it is clearly recognizable even for the less keen-eyed spectators; on the other hand, it is placed above the young generation’s bookcase, thus indicating that they, too owe something to their father’s master.

Question 39

Katalin G. Kalay

Shakespeare allusion quote james tyrone

Answer 39

In Act Four, well under the influence of alcohol, he seems to agree stubbornly with Edmund’s scornful suggestion saying that for him, Shakespeare was an Irish Catholic, and this gesture, though quite
absurd, is one of self-identification, it acknowledges his intimate, almost family relationship with his favorite writer.

Question 40

Stephen A Black

Answer 40

The assumption that understanding gives people control over themselves, over circumstances, and over nature itself

Question 41

Travis Bogard

Answer 41

“The Tyrones world is seen in its barest essentials”