books:

	• Long Day's Journey into Night Eugene O'Neill Yale University Press, 2002 - 192 pages average customer review:based on 65 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The whole Tyrone family is in a state of despair, and it's hard to think of an author better at capturing despair than O'Neill (in no small part, one suspects, because he came of age in the sort of environment depicted in this play). O'Neill was certainly bitter about his past, but, importantly, he doesn't lose perspective. Although the way the Tyrones treat each other ranges from neutral to downright cruel, O'Neill does a splendid job of balancing this against the fact that they all love each other deeply and feel very unnerved whenever they realize that they're treating each other unfairly. Despite all the problems he faced as a young adult, O'Neill always viewed his family with a good deal of love and reverence, and that comes through in the play. As Mary puts 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." The tragedy of Long Day's Journey into Night lies in the fact that these great individuals have lost their true selves due to the various demons that haunt their lives.

Some of O'Neill's works could reasonably be criticized for featuring relatively one-dimensional characters and formulaic plots. In the case of Long Day's Journey, though, because O'Neill was able to rely on his own experiences, all four main characters are exceptionally deep and balanced, and the plot is distinctly unpredictable. Though I've very much enjoyed all the O'Neill plays I've read, it seems that in Long Day's Journey he finally put together all his talents and produced his crowning achievement.

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Great

Eventually, you could give five stars to the play, because the content is on such a high level, so impressive and heavy, it might change your life. But sometimes the conversations are a bit too confuse and too longdrawn that tension gets lost. The Tyrones, an isolated Irish family, is suffering bitterly. The father is stingy, the mother is a dope fiend, one son is an alcoholic and the other is deadly ill. After the stay in the sanatarium, the mother is very sensitive and the other family members try to avoid every conflict with her. But you can' t avoid destiny. Fights start in this family that has never been a unit. Past comes up, old problems come up. Everyone is blaming each other for every little malicious deed they have done once. It alway gets extremer, and as a reader you hope they just stop this misery, but you know there is no solution. It's an autobiographical play and it shows that Eugene O'Neill is a gifted real playwright

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Depressive

It's a gloom play with conversations full of anger, rage and sarcasm, grief and sorrow. It's the story of a family whose members have lost every connections between each other, four characters that desperately seek a last vestige of love to be confronted only with disappointment in the end. It's an autobiographical play, too. I read the book late at night, sometime after midnight had passed, along with a couple of cigarettes and some wine. And it really got me. The feeling of being detached from everything else, to be utterly alone with yourself and the thoughts of your mind, it crept more and more on me with every page I turned. These are genuine wounds that bloom before our eyes like the flowers of torment and sometimes I meant to even hear the echo of the cries of the hurt when my heart beat faster. But if one doesn't want to open up to the sinister and absolutely melancholic atmosphere of the book I can well understand that...

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pathetic, miserable, and beautiful

Long Day's Journey into Night draws a crystal clear picture of what happens when people who love each other try to fix people rather than problems, or when they perceive each other as doing so. Everyone has problems, but the Tyrones' problems, drink, morphine, tuberculosis, are especially difficult. Everyone is afraid to fix them because in fixing them they fear to be blamed for them. They pass blame like a hot potato, and they love each other dearly, and they're miserable. They can't stop hurting each other. Like the People's Front of Judea from Monty Python's LIFE OF BRIAN, they sit around and talk about problems, but the problem never goes away. What the world needs is not the absence of problems but the absence of judgment. Better to light a candle than curse the darkness. The Tyrones continue to curse the darkness throughout the play. The entire play does nothing but curse darkness. It's pitiful. Extremely emotional and well-written.

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