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Quotes from Long Day's Journey Into Night

Eugene O'Neill ·  179 pages

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“None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“EDMUND *Then with alcoholic talkativeness You've just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They're all connected with the sea. Here's one. When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and signing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself -- actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. Then another time, on the American Line, when I was lookout on the crow's nest in the dawn watch. A calm sea, that time. Only a lazy ground swell and a slow drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping looking, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. the peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men's lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like a veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see -- and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason! *He grins wryly. It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a a little in love with death! TYRONE *Stares at him -- impressed. Yes, there's the makings of a poet in you all right. *Then protesting uneasily. But that's morbid craziness about not being wanted and loving death. EDMUND *Sardonically The *makings of a poet. No, I'm afraid I'm like the guy who is always panhandling for a smoke. He hasn't even got the makings. He's got only the habit. I couldn't touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That's the best I'll ever do, I mean, if I live. Well, it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“We are such things as rubbish is made of, so let's drink up and forget it.” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself!.. And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience, became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on towards nowhere for no good reason.” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“It wasn't the fog I minded, Cathleen. I really love fog. [...] It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you any more.” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us.” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason! ” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience, became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on towards nowhere for no good reason.” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“EDMUND (with alcoholic talkativeness): You've just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They're all connected with the sea. Here's one. When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself -- actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. Then another time, on the American Line, when I was lookout on the crow's nest in the dawn watch. A calm sea, that time. Only a lazy ground swell and a slow drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. The peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men's lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see -- and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“TYRONE [ Stares at him -- impressed. ] Yes, there's the makings of a poet in you all right. [ Then protesting uneasily ] But that's morbid craziness about not being wanted and loving death. EDMUND [ Sardonically ] The makings of a poet. No, I'm afraid I'm like the guy who is always panhandling for a smoke. He hasn't even got the makings. He's got only the habit. I couldn't touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That's the best I'll ever do, I mean, if I live. Well, it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“Happy roads is bunk. Weary roads is right. Get you nowhere fast. That's where I've got—nowhere. Where everyone lands in the end, even if most of the suckers won't admit it.” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“On my solemn oath, Edmund, I'd gladly face not having an acre of land to call my own, nor a penny in the bank, I'd be willing to have no home but the poorhouse in my old age, if I could look back now on having been the fine artist I might have been.” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“He thinks money spent on a home is money wasted. He's lived too much in hotels. Never the best hotels, of course. Second-rate hotels. He doesn't understand a home. He doesn't feel at home in it. And yet, he wants a home. He's even proud of having this shabby place. He loves it here.” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“But land is land, and it's safer than the stocks and bonds of Wall Street swindlers.” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“EDMUND: It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, of whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave star, bird, clock, will answer you: 'it is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will."" (He grins at his father provocatively.)” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“- Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it? It's the three Gorgons in one. You look in their faces and turn to stone. Or it's Pan. You see him and you die - that is, inside you - and have to go on living as a ghost. - You have a poet in you but it's a damned morbid one!” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for time.” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“Yes, facts don't mean a thing, do they? What you want to believe, that's the only truth!” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“You're lying to yourself again. You wanted to get rid of them. Their contempt and disgust aren't pleasant company. You're glad they're gone.” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“What I wanted to say is, I'd like to see you become the greatest success in the world. But you'd better be on your guard. Because I'll do my damnedest to make you fail. Can't help it. I hate myself. Got to take revenge. On everyone else. Especially you. Oscar Wilde's "Reading Gaol" has the dope twisted. The man was dead and so he had to kill the thing he loved. That's what it ought to be. The dead part of me hopes you won't get well. Maybe he's even glad the same has got Mama again! He wants company, he doesn't want to be the only corpse around the house!” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“Your father goes out. He meets his friends in barrooms or at the Club. You and Jamie have the boys you know. You go out. But I’m alone. I’ve always been alone.” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“It makes it so much harder, living in this atmosphere of constant suspicion, knowing everyone is spying on me, and none of you believe in me, or trust me.” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“I know it's useless to talk. But sometimes I feel so lonely.” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

“Oh, I'm so sick and tired of pretending this is a home! You won't help me! You won't put yourself out the least bit! You don't know how to act in a home! You don't really want one! You never wanted one - never since the day we were married! You should have remained a bachelor and lived in second-rate hotels and entertained your friends in barrooms!” ― Eugene O'Neill, quote from Long Day's Journey Into Night

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Eugene O'Neill Born place: in New York, New York, The United States Born date October 16, 1888 See more on GoodReads

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• Long Day's Journey into Night: Novel Summary: Act 1
• Long Day's Journey into Night: Novel Summary: Act 2 Scene 1
• Long Day's Journey into Night: Novel Summary: Act 2 Scene 2
• Long Day's Journey into Night: Novel Summary: Act 3
• Long Day's Journey into Night: Novel Summary: Act 4
• Long Day's Journey into Night: Character Profiles
• Long Day's Journey into Night: Metaphor Analysis
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Long Day's Journey into Night: Top Ten Quotes

• Long Day's Journey into Night: Biography: Eugene O'Neill
• Long Day's Journey into Night: Essay Q&A
• [I]f you can't be good you can at least be careful." Act 1 Jamie summarizes the advice he gave to his younger brother.
• "None of us can help the things life has done to us." Act 2, scene 1 Mary tries to excuse her son Jamie for his faults, but her comment reveals her attitude to herself as well.
• "I hate doctors! They'll do anything-anything to keep you coming back to them. They'll sell their souls! What's worse, they'll sell yours, and you never know it till one day you find yourself in hell!" Act 2, scene 2 Mary gives vent to her anger.
• "The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too." Act 2, scene 2 Mary expresses her depressed vision of how people are slaves to what happened in the past.
• "If he's ever had a loftier dream than whores and whiskey, he's never shown it." Act 3 Tyrone speaks about Jamie.
• "Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted-to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself." Act 4 Edmund speaks of his feelings as he walked home in the fog.
• "I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky." Act 4 Edmund tells his father about the ecstasy of some of his experiences at sea.
• "For a second you see-and seeing the secret are the secret. For a second there is meaning." Act 4 Edmund talks about the meaning of his peak experiences at sea.
• "Happy roads is bunk. Weary roads is right. Get you nowhere fast. That's where I've got-nowhere. Where everyone lands in the end, even if more of the suckers won't admit it." Act 4 Jamie finally confesses the truth about his own life.
• "The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!" Act 4 Jamie's sardonic remark when his mother enters the room, apparently unaware of her surroundings.
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Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night

Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 27, 2020 • ( 0 )

The simplicity of the play’s dramatic form; the complexity of its four major characters and the progressive unfolding of their psychological richness; the directness of their presentation without gimmickry or sentimentality; the absorbing emotional rhythm of their interactions; the intensity of their quest for meaning; the natural yet expressive quality of their dialogue; their insights concerning guilt, vulnerability, and the need for family connection—these are among the qualities that have gained the play its status as a world classic. Long Day’s Journey into Night simultaneously marks the pinnacle of O’Neill’s career and the coming of age of American drama.

—Michael Hinden, Long Day’s Journey into Night : Native Eloquence

Long Day’s Journey into Night —the greatest American play by the United States’s greatest playwright—is a harrowing work of personal memory universalized into the great American family tragedy. At the end of a remarkable career that produced more than 50 plays and after a seemingly inexhaustible series of theatrical experimentations that established the baseline and boundaries for a vital new American drama, Eugene O’Neill finally returned to simplicity itself: autobiography and a day-in-the-life repossession of his own family history as a summary statement of his long journey toward self-understanding and self-expression. The urgency and utility of O’Neill’s dramatic version of Remembrance of Things Past (Marcel Proust’s seven-volume epic autobiographical novel) is announced significantly and succinctly by Mary Tyrone, who early on in the play states: “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future too.” O’Neill’s entire past is prelude and preparation for the tragic recognition that animates his masterpiece. Again, it is Mary Tyrone who summarizes the tragic sensibility that informs O’Neill’s plays and finds its best expression in Long Day’s Journey: “None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.”

Born in 1888 in a hotel room in the heart of New York’s theatrical district, O’Neill was the son of matinee idol and onetime distinguished Shakespearean actor, James O’Neill, who made his reputation and fortune by continually touring in a melodrama based on Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. The commercial theater of the day, in which his father squandered his considerable acting talent, consisted of gratifying public taste with the lowest popular denominator. Eugene O’Neill, his disappointed father, his drug-addicted mother, and his alcoholic elder brother were all in various ways products of the theater of the day. O’Neill’s transient childhood was spent touring the United States with his parents and attending boarding schools. He was suspended from Princeton after a year for a college prank and introduced to the bohemian world by his actor-brother, James. O’Neill’s aimless and dissipated youth is succinctly summarized by critic Jordan Y. Miller:

At twenty, almost on a dare, he had married a girl he hardly knew, fathered a child he never saw until nearly twelve years later, went gold prospecting in Honduras, contracted malaria, and was divorced before he was twenty-two. He failed as a newspaper reporter, became intimate with all the more famous New York and Connecticut bordellos, to which he was guided by his brother James; evidence all of fast becoming a hopeless alcoholic; and, after attempting suicide, contracted a severe lung infection to place him in a Connecticut tuberculosis sanitarium at the age of twenty-four.

During his convalescence from 1912 to 1913, O’Neill read widely and decided to become a playwright. His first dramatic work was done for the Province-town Players, of Cape Cod and in New York City’s Greenwich Village, the most influential company in the “little theater” movement. His first stage production, Bound East for Cardiff, based on his experience as a seaman, was followed by Beyond the Horizon and The Emperor Jones, both in 1920, which established O’Neill as a powerful new force in the American theater. For the next 15 years, O’Neill would display an extraordinary range in his restless search for an expressive form that virtually catalogs the various methods of modern drama. As he stated in a 1923 interview, “I intend to use whatever I can make my own, to write about anything under the sun in any manner that fits the subject. And I shall never be influenced by any consideration but one: Is it the truth as I know it—or, better still, feel it?”

To arrive at truth in the face of a breakdown of traditional beliefs and its crippling effect on the psyche, O’Neill experimented with symbolism, masks, interior monologues, choruses, and realistic and expressionistic styles. His early plays were “slice of life” dramas, focusing on the delusions and obsessions of marginalized characters—seamen, laborers, roust-abouts, prostitutes, and derelicts—who had never before been depicted on the American stage. Most are adrift and deeply divided from their identities and the traditional sources of sustaining values. Increasingly, his plays would dramatize a tragic vision in naturalistic plays such as Anna Christie (1921) and Desire Under the Elms (1924), and a series of expressionistic plays, including The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape (1920), and The Great God Brown (1926). In Strange Interlude (1928) O’Neill began dissecting character through interior monologue, never before attempted on stage on such a scale. His work in the 1930s included the monumental Mourning Becomes Electra, in which Aeschylus ’s drama of the house of Atreus is transferred to post–Civil War New England. His single comedy, Ah, Wilderness! (1933), is based on his happiest memories summering at his family’s New London, Connecticut, home, the same setting he would use for his darkest tragic drama, Long Day’s Journey. In 1934 the failure of his play Days without Endbegan a 12-year period in which no new O’Neill plays were staged and initiated a final creative explosion prompted by O’Neill’s commitment to write “plays primarily as literature to be read.” In 1936 O’Neill became the second American (and to date the only American dramatist) to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. The first American Nobel laureate, Sinclair Lewis, praised the playwright as follows:

Mr. Eugene O’Neill, who has done nothing much in American drama save to transform it utterly, in ten or twelve years, from a false world of neat and competent trickery to a world of splendor and fear and greatness . . . has seen life as not to be arranged in the study of a scholar but as a terrifying, magnificent, and often horrible thing akin to the tornado, the earthquake, the devastating fire.

The “horrible thing” that Lewis equates with a natural disaster continually threatens the Tyrone family in Long Day’s Journey , just below the surface of their seemingly placid summer holiday routine in August 1912, at their Connecticut seaside home. O’Neill began work on Long Day’s Journey in the summer of 1939 as war in Europe threatened and his own health was in significant decline from a debilitating nerve disorder. Feeling “fed up and stale” after nearly five years’ work on an immense cycle of plays reflecting American history from the perspective of an Irish-American family, O’Neill decided to turn to private subjects, sketching the outline of two plays that “appeal most.” One was based on his time spent in a bar on the Bowery in New York, which became The Iceman Cometh ; the other, a laceratingly honest portrait of his past, that he identified as the “N[ew]. L[ondon]. family” play, and later called “a play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood”: Long Day’s Journey into Night . Completing work on Iceman first, O’Neill spent most of 1940 on Long Day’s Journey . His wife, Carlotta, recalled:

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 his study at the end of the 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. I think he felt freer when he got it out of his system. It was his way of making peace with his family—and himself.

Completing the second draft by his 52nd birthday, in October 1940, O’Neill made the final cuts to the typescript that Carlotta had prepared by the end of March 1941, recording in his diary: “Like this play better than any I have ever written—does the most with the least—a quiet play!—and a great one, I believe.” Due to its autobiographical content, O’Neill stipulated that his play neither be published nor performed until at least 25 years after his death. However, after he died in 1953, Carlotta, claiming that her husband had orally withdrawn his prohibition shortly before his death, allowed the play to be staged by the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre in February 1956, to coincide with its American publication. The English-language premiere of the play occurred on Broadway in November 1956 to great acclaim. Reviewer John Chapman called it “O’Neill’s most beautiful play . . . and . . . one of the great dramas of any time,” while critic Brooks Atkinson declared that with Long Day’s Journey “American theater acquires stature and size.” The play has gone on to be recognized as O’Neill’s greatest achievement and a triumph both for U.S. and world theater.

Its power derives from its relentless honesty linked to the simplicity of its dramatic form. The action is compressed to the events of a single day that progressively reveal the psychological complexity and tragic mutual dependency of the play’s four major characters—James and Mary Tyrone and their sons Jamie and Edmund—along with the secrets that define and doom their family. It is Edmund’s ill health, which his mother insists is only a summer cold but his doctor diagnoses as tuberculosis, that serves as a catalyst for the play’s pounding series of revelations and recognitions. James, Jamie, and Edmund alternately accept and reject their suspicion that Mary has relapsed in her morphine addiction, while each family member is forced to face their guilt and responsibility for the past that haunts the family. Mary, who had abandoned her vocation to become a nun or a concert pianist to marry the handsome actor James Tyrone, ultimately blames her husband and sons for her addiction: specifically, Jamie for the accidental death of another son, significantly named Eugene; Edmund for his difficult birth that required medical care; and James for his stinginess that led to employing a second-rate doctor who started her on morphine. The others, in turn, confront their own complicity in the family’s self-destruction, while each is given an aria of insight into the truth of their situation.

The patriarch, James Tyrone, reviews his acting career in which he exchanged seemingly unlimited artistic promise for financial security, fueled by his early lower-class Irish impoverishment. He confesses:

That God-damned play I bought for a song, and made such a great success in—a great money success—it ruined me with its promise of an easy fortune. . . . It was a great romantic part I knew I could play better than anyone. But it was a great box office success from the start—and then life had me where it wanted me—at from thirty-five to forty thousand net profit a season! A fortune in those days—or even in these. What the hell was it I wanted to buy, I wonder, that was worth—Well, no matter. It’s a late day for regrets.

Edmund, understanding for the first time the cost of his father’s success and the origins of his miserliness, reciprocates his father’s honesty with his own confession in one of the most moving and lyrical passages O’Neill ever wrote. Recalling his time at sea, Edmund admits to a moment of supreme transcendence:

I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you to put it that way. . . . For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hands let the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!

Edmund’s ecstasy of affirmation gives way to a deeply tragic self- and existential awareness: “It was a great mistake, my being born a man. I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!”

The play concludes with Jamie’s confession of his resentment of his brother and his secret delight in his family’s destruction that grants him the consoling role of damned and powerless victim: “The dead part of me hopes you won’t get well. Maybe he’s even glad the game has got Mama again! He wants company, he doesn’t want to be the only corpse around the house!” Jamie’s warning to his brother that he actually desires Edmund’s and the family’s destruction, that he secretly hates them all and himself, is ironically one of the great testaments of love and loyalty in the play. “Greater love hath no man than this,” Jamie declares, “that he saveth his brother from himself.”

These family revelations reach a crescendo with the appearance of Mary, carrying her wedding gown—in the bitter words of Jamie, “The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!” Completing the family tableau and individual monologues that probe the causes and costs of the family’s dilemmas, Mary has retreated with the assistance of morphine into the fog that has threatened throughout the day. Escaping from reality, she has reverted to an earlier existence, before the consequences of marriage and motherhood, and ends the play heart-breakingly with her memories as a convent schoolgirl and her intention to become a nun:

But Mother Elizabeth told me I must be more sure than that, even, that I must prove it wasn’t simply my imagination. She said, if I was so sure, then I wouldn’t mind putting myself to a test by going home after I graduated, and living as other girls lived, going out to parties and dances and enjoying myself; and then if after a year or two I still felt sure, I could come back to see her and we would talk it over again. . . . That was in the winter of senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.

Love here is balanced with loss, youthful hopes with crushing disappointment, completing the process by which each of the Tyrones is forced to come to terms with all that is intractable in one’s self, one’s family, one’s existence. The play reaches a terminal point in which there seems no possibility of consolation or regeneration, signaled by O’Neill’s final stage direction: “She stares before her in a sad dream. Tyrone stirs in his chair. Edmund and Jamie remain motionless.”

The play’s final tragic awareness is that we are who we are, condemned by family and history to forever seek transcendence and fail to find it. Yet the play’s title metaphor of a journey toward closure, toward the dark recognition of frustration, disappointment, and mortality also implies a dawn of sorts, if only in the shattering illumination of naked truths.

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Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s Plays

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Long Day's Journey Into Night Guilt and Blame Quotes

How we cite our quotes: citations follow this format: (act.scene.line). every time a character talks counts as one line, even if what they say turns into a long monologue..

MARY I'm not blaming you, dear. How can you help it? How can any one of us forget? (1.1.228)

Mary's argument here is that Edmund can't be blamed for being suspicious of Mary, since the past cannot be forgotten. See the quotes on "Fate and Free Will" for more on the past's influence on the present.

MARY Bitterly. Because he's always sneering at someone else, always looking for the worst weakness in everyone. Then, with a strange, abrupt change to a detached, impersonal tone . But I suppose life has made him like that, and he can't help it. None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever. (2.1.76)

Once again, under the influence of morphine, Mary abandons the blame game, recognizing that getting mad at Jamie logically leads to her blaming herself for poor decisions she made in her past (such as, perhaps, marrying James or having Edmund). That's why she says " you lose your true self": she attributes the blame of her past actions to a self that wasn't essentially her, a self that came about due to bad circumstances.

MARY In a real home one is never lonely. You forget I know from experience what a home is like. I gave up one to marry you – my father's home. (2.2.3)

This is an interesting line – yes, Mary's doing her classic "my life changed when I married James and now it's way worse" shtick, but check out how she's positioning James relative to her father. We see here the makings of another important theme for Mary: James is expected to do the double duty of husband and father for Mary. When Mary married James, he became a stand-in, a replacement for her dead father. This pressure on James is intense, and he (perhaps reasonably) fails to live up to her demands.

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Colleen Dewhurst as Mary Tyrone and Jason Robards as James Tyrone in Yale Rep’s 1988 production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night .

• Playwrights

Eugene O’Neill + Long Day’s Journey Into Night Meet the master artist through one of his most important works

At the time Eugene O’Neill’s first play was produced in 1916, there really wasn’t much original or serious work being performed on America’s stages. Sure, occasionally people went to see a Shakespearean play, but mostly they bought tickets to the popular melodrama that was filled with overacting and exaggerated emotion—where the story and situation were important and the characters were not. They were also enjoying vaudeville—variety shows featuring magicians, animal tricks, acrobats, and song-and-dance teams.

But O’Neill changed all that.

Lesson Content

The father of american theater.

Writing with Emotional Honesty

Eugene O’Neill said that his goal was “to get an audience to leave the theatre with an exultant feeling from seeing somebody on stage facing life, fighting against the eternal odds, not conquering but perhaps inevitably being conquered. The individual life is made significant just by the struggle.” Struggle was a familiar subject to O’Neill.

Eugene O’Neill was born in 1888 in a New York City hotel right on Broadway. His father was a famous traveling actor who made his living playing the lead role in the melodramatic play, The Count of Monte Cristo . The young Eugene spent a lot of time on the road and backstage, learning about theater (and becoming disillusioned with the light, frothy plays that made his father’s career). He felt that his father had wasted his talent by choosing commercial success over artistic excellence—a point that O’Neill addressed later in Long Day’s Journey Into Night .

He attended college for a short time, then traveled, and took up odd jobs. He worked on a cattle boat, prospected for gold, and spent a lot of time with artists. Many of these experiences would eventually influence his work, especially his early short plays about the sea.

In 1912, O’Neill got tuberculosis. During his recovery in a sanitarium, he read the great playwrights August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, and Henrik Ibsen. Their plays were highly realistic and inspired O’Neill to write about characters facing impossible odds. O’Neill disliked popular plays that went for cheap laughs and portrayed shallow emotions. In fact, he referred to Broadway as a “show shop,” a place where he felt it was easy to find such entertainment. His plays were going to be poetically beautiful and emotionally honest.

O’Neill was awarded four Pulitzer Prizes and is still the only American playwright ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died on November 27, 1953.

The Visionary

Have you ever seen a play where the dialogue sounded as real as everyday speech? Or where the set looked exactly like a location in real life? Have you seen characters onstage who seemed to be as real and complex as your friends and family? If so, you can thank Eugene O’Neill. He introduced American audiences to Realism—the idea that a play should look and sound as much as possible like real life.

But O’Neill also tried out other ideas and techniques:

• He experimented with using simultaneous action onstage.
• He used the “aside,” a way for characters to reveal their true thoughts by speaking directly to the audience.
• He used masks—an unusual technique to include in contemporary drama.

Long Day's Journey Into Night

This autobiographical play depicts one long, summer day in the life of the fictional Tyrone family, a dysfunctional household based on O’Neill’s immediate family during his early years. James Tyrone is a vain actor and penny pincher, as was O’Neill’s father James. Mary Tyrone struggles with a morphine addiction, as did his mother Ellen. The fictional son Jamie Tyrone is an alcoholic, as was O’Neill’s brother Jamie. And the Tyrones’ younger son Edmund is deathly ill with tuberculosis. (O’Neill himself suffered and recovered from a mild case of tuberculosis.)

It’s a story of love, hate, betrayal, addiction, blame, and the fragility of family bonds—particularly between fathers and sons. O’Neill took two years to write it, essentially reliving his own painful past as he wrote about it. In the play, he bares his soul and essentially tells the world what it was like to grow up in his own house. No wonder he called it a “play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood.”

In order to spare his family from pain, O’Neill requested that the play not be published until 25 years after he died. In 1956, three years after O’Neill’s death, his widow Carlotta allowed the play to be published since the immediate family had predeceased the playwright.  

Why the Play Endures: Story

It’s an August morning at the summer home of James and Mary Tyrone. James (also called Tyrone) is an aging actor, and even though he has done well financially, he’s a miser. Mary has recently returned from a sanatorium for her addiction to morphine. Their older son Jamie is out of a job and has moved back home for the summer. Their younger son Edmund is very ill.

Breakfast has just ended, and a day of discord is just beginning. It’s obvious that Mary has started taking morphine again. It’s also clear that Edmund has tuberculosis, but the men try to shield Mary from the truth, making her think that Edmund has a bad cold. Jamie accuses Tyrone of sending Edmund to a cheap and terrible doctor and suggests that Edmund would be in better health if Tyrone weren’t so cheap. As the day goes on, a thick fog surrounds the house. Secrets are revealed and old emotional wounds are reopened.

It seems that Tyrone caused Mary’s morphine addiction when he refused to pay for a good doctor to treat Mary’s pain after Edmund’s birth. Mary refuses to believe that she’s an addict, even as she continues to take morphine just to get through the day. The three men drink heavily as the hours pass…to the point where Tyrone and Jamie are barely functioning as night settles in. The literal fog outside the house and the metaphorical fog of addiction have overtaken the family.

As the Tyrones refight their old battles and repeat the same arguments, it’s pretty apparent that this day is not all that different from the many other days in the family’s life. They relive old hurts and blame each other for their failures. By the end of the play, the audience is left to wonder: What happens to us when we are unable to let go of the past? What happens to a family that lives in denial of its problems? Is it ever okay to lie to someone to spare their feelings? What is it like to feel lost without any hope?

Why the Play Endures: Production

Long Day’s Journey Into Night is considered to be O’Neill’s greatest play not only for its story and characters but also because of its inventive, theatrical elements including:

• The play’s form and structure. The play tells the story of one family over the course of one day. O’Neill shows us the passage of time in a particularly heartbreaking way: through the family’s addictions. As the day progresses, Mary becomes more and more affected by the morphine that she takes. And the men become increasingly drunk. Though we see the men drink, O’Neill never shows us Mary using morphine; we only see the affect that it has on her. Why do you think that is?
• Stage directions. O’Neill’s stage directions are precise. For example, his description of the set—down to the type of books that are on the family’s bookshelves—reveals as much about the characters as do the descriptions of the characters themselves.
• Lighting. O’Neill’s description of the lighting is another way that he shows us the passage of time. When the play begins (in the morning), he tells us that “sunshine comes through the windows.” At the beginning of Act Two (early afternoon), he tells us that “no sunlight comes into the room…outside the day is still fine but increasingly sultry, with a faint haziness in the air which softens the glare of the sun.” And so it goes—with the light changing—to the end of the play. Through the lighting design, we actually see the “long day’s journey into night.”
• Language. The characters in the play speak like real people speak. And the characters sound differently as the day goes on. As the men drink and Mary uses morphine, their language changes as a result of their being under the influence.
• Metaphor. The fog that eventually overtakes the house is a metaphor (or symbol) for something else. O’Neill shows us that the literal fog represents the fog of addiction. No one is able to escape.
• Theme . O’Neill addresses tough, real-life issues of addiction, guilt, and betrayal. When the play appeared on Broadway, nothing like it had been seen before. The play forced audiences to grapple with difficult issues. It exposed the deep psychological traits of its main characters—and by extension, the audience.

Enter, Stage Right

O’Neill was as famous for writing long, intricate stage directions as he was for writing dialogue. In fact, if you pick up a script of Long Day’s Journey Into Night , you’ll read several pages of stage directions before you even get to the play’s action! O’Neill had very particular ideas about what the stage set should look like…and he had equally strong opinions about what his characters should look like. 

Here is just a small excerpt describing James Tyrone:

“…About five feet eight, broad-shouldered and deep-chested, he seems taller and slenderer because of his bearing, which has a soldierly quality of head up, chest out, stomach in, shoulders squared…He has never been really sick a day in his life. He has no nerves. There is a lot of stolid, earthy peasant in him, mixed with streaks of sentimental melancholy and rare flashes of intuitive sensibility.”

Once you read past the introductory stage directions, you’ll see that pretty much every line of dialogue is preceded by a description of how the actor should act the line. Actors are directed to say their lines “almost resentfully,” “with satisfaction,” or in a “mechanically rebuking” way. It’s typical O’Neill, and is something that playwrights these days tend to avoid doing. Why do you think that O’Neill was so precise and exact in writing stage directions?

The Complete and Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O’Neill

O’Neill is famous for writing very precise stage directions. Of course, audiences who see the plays don’t actually get to hear them. The New York NeoFuturists changed that by creating a work called  The Complete and Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O’Neill . 

Eugene O’Neill’s plays still move audiences today, nearly 60 years after his death. Here are some places to learn more about O’Neill, about Long Day’s Journey Into Night , and about his theatrical style:

• Check out the PBS American Experience site for their in-depth supporting materials for the documentary Eugene O'Neill
• Check out some vaudeville to get an idea of what American theater was like before Eugene O’Neill (but don’t bother to turn up your speakers! This film is silent.)

Theater Talk: Barbara and Arthur Gelb on playwright Eugene O'Neill

Arthur and Barbara Gelb wrote the first major biography of Eugene O’Neill in 1962. And they were in the audience the night that  Long Day’s Journey Into Night  opened on Broadway. 

Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962 Trailer)

Author Eugene O'Neill gives an autobiographical account of his explosive homelife, fused by a drug-addicted mother, a father who wallows in drink after realizing he is no longer a famous actor and an older brother who is emotionally unstable and a misfit. The family is reflected by the youngest son, who is a sensitive and aspiring writer.

Long Days Journey Into Night (1987)

Jack Lemmon, Bethel Leslie, Peter Gallagher and Kevin Spacey star in the Eugene O'Neill's epic autobiographical tragicomedy directed by Jonathan Miller.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1996)

Starring William Hutt, Martha Henry, Tom McCamus, and Peter Donaldson, directed by David Wellington.

Theater Talk: Brian Dennehy

Brian Dennehy discusses his role in Long Day's Journey into Night (2003). He discusses the importance of this play and past plays, the impact of the many themes within this play on the audience, as well as the production and writing put into this play.

2012 London production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night 

Watch an excerpt from the 2012 London production of  Long Day’s Journey Into Night starring David Suchet and Laurie Metcalf.

Theater Talk: Gabriel Byrne

Tony Award-nominated actor Gabriel Byrne from the Roundabout Theatre Company's 2016 revival of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night  talks about the inspiration for his character, O'Neill's father, James, once one of the most promising actors of his generation. He also shares some of the fundamentals of acting that inform his performance and those of his co-stars Jessica Lange, John Gallagher, Jr. and Michael Shannon, as they interpret this great classic of the American stage that runs over three and a half hours.

Highlights From Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2016)

The 2016 Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night , with Jessica Lange, Gabriel Byrne, Michael Shannon, John Gallagher Jr. and Colby Minifie.

Renee Calarco

Lisa Resnick

October 9, 2019

Arena Stage. Eugene O'Neill Festival Online.

http://www.arenastage.org/shows-tickets/sub-text/2011-12-season/eugene-oneill-festival/the-american-shakespeare.shtml

ARTSEDGE: Fractured Families in American Drama.

http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/educators/lessons/grade-9-12/Fractured_Families.aspx

ARTSEDGE: Eugene O'Neill on Page and Stage.

http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/educators/lessons/grade-9-12/Eugene_ONeill_Page_Stage.aspx#Overview

Block, Haskell M. and Shedd, Robert G., eds. Masters of Modern Drama. New York: Random House, 1962, pp. 573-574.

eoneill.com: an Electronic Eugene O'Neill Archive.

http://eoneill.com

IMDb. Website.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0642156/bio

Jefferson, Margo. «On Writers and Writing; Alone with O'Neill.» The New York Times , July 6, 2003.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/books/on-writers-and-writing-alone-with-o-neill.html

Nobel Prize.org. Website.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1936/press.html

PBS, American Experience. Website.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/oneill/index.html

Smith, Wendy. «From Sea-Chanties to the Moon.» American Theatre , July/August 2012. 

http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/julyaugust12/seachanties.cfm

Wilmeth, Don B., ed. The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 400-401 and 497-498.

YouTube: The Rise of Melodrama

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkS1PabITDQ&feature=relmfu

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Long Day’s Journey into Night

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Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

Jamie tyrone quotes in long day’s journey into night.

TYRONE You’re a fine lunkhead! Haven’t you any sense? The one thing to avoid is saying anything that would get her more upset over Edmund.

JAMIE Shrugging his shoulders . All right. Have it your way. I think it’s the wrong idea to let Mama go on kidding herself. It will only make the shock worse when she has to face it. Anyway, you can see she’s deliberately fooling herself with that summer cold talk. She knows better.

You’ve been the worst influence for him. He grew up admiring you as a hero! A fine example you set him! If you ever gave him advice except in the ways of rottenness, I’ve never heard of it! You made him old before his time, pumping him full of what you consider worldly wisdom, when he was too young to see that your mind was so poisoned by your own failure in life, you wanted to believe every man was a knave with his soul for sale, and every woman who wasn’t a whore was a fool!

Yes, this time you can see how strong and sure of herself she is. She’s a different woman entirely from the other times. She has control of her nerves—or she had until Edmund got sick. Now you can feel her growing tense and frightened underneath. I wish to God we could keep the truth from her, but we can’t if he has to be sent to a sanatorium. What makes it worse is her father died of consumption. She worshiped him and she’s never forgotten. Yes, it will be hard for her. But she can do it! She has the will power now! We must help her, Jamie, in every way we can!

Because he’s always sneering at someone else, always looking for the worst weakness in everyone.

Then with a strange, abrupt change to a detached, impersonal tone.

But I suppose life has made him like that, and he can’t help it. None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.

Oh, I’m so sick and tired of pretending this is a home! You won’t help me! You won’t put yourself out the least bit! You don’t know how to act in a home! You don’t really want one! You never have wanted one—never since the day we were married! You should have remained a bachelor and lived in second-rate hotels and entertained your friends in barrooms!

She adds strangely, as if she were now talking aloud to herself rather than to Tyrone.

Then nothing would ever have happened.

They stare at her. Tyrone knows now. He suddenly looks a tired, bitterly sad old man.

You’re to blame, James. How could you let him? Do you want to kill him? Don’t you remember my father? He wouldn’t stop after he was stricken. He said doctors were fools! He thought, like you, that whiskey is a good tonic!

A look of terror comes into her eyes and she stammers.

But, of course, there’s no comparison at all. I don’t know why I—Forgive me for scolding you, James. One small drink won’t hurt Edmund. It might be good for him, if it gives him an appetite.

The family are returning from lunch as the curtain rises. Mary is the first to enter from the back par ­ lor. Her husband follows. He is not with her as he was in the similar entrance after breakfast at the opening of Act One. He avoids touching her or looking at her. There is condemnation in his face, mingled now with the beginning of an old weary, helpless resignation. Jamie and Edmund follow their father. Jamie’s face is hard with defensive cyni ­ cism. Edmund tries to copy this defense but without success. He plainly shows he is heartsick as well as physically ill.

TYRONE You ought to be kicked out in the gutter! But if I did it, you know damned well who’d weep and plead for you, and excuse you and complain till I let you come back.

JAMIE A spasm of pain crosses his face. Christ, don’t I know that? No pity? I have all the pity in the world for her. I understand what a hard game to beat she’s up against— which is more than you ever have! My lingo didn’t mean I had no feeling. I was merely putting bluntly what we all know, and have to live with now, again.

The cures are no damned good except for a while. The truth is there is no cure and we’ve been saps to hope—

They never come back!

I suppose it’s because I feel so damned sunk. Because this time Mama had me fooled. I really believed she had it licked. She thinks I always believe the worst, but this time I believed the best.

His voice flutters.

I suppose I can’t forgive her—yet. It meant so much. I’d begun to hope, if she’d beaten the game, I could, too.

He begins to sob , and the horrible part of his weeping is that it appears sober, not the maudlin tears of drunkenness.

Did it on purpose to make a bum of you. Or part of me did. A big part. That part that’s been dead so long. That hates life. My putting you wise so you’d learn from my mistakes. Believed that myself at times, but it’s a fake. Made my mistakes look good. Made getting drunk romantic. Made whores fascinating vampires instead of poor, stupid, diseased slobs they really are. Made fun of work as sucker’s game. Never wanted you succeed and make me look even worse by comparison. Wanted you to fail. Always jealous of you. Mama’s baby, Papa’s pet!

He stares at Edmund with increasing enmity.

And it was your being born that started Mama on dope. I know that’s not your fault, but all the same, God damn you, I can’t help hating your guts — !

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