Ghost's Addiction

Ghost’s Addiction:

Eugene O'Neill's 

"Long Day's Journey Into Night"  

       

      

               We can’t forget the ghost’s within us …

                        “Us, the fog people!”

In "Long Day's Journey into Night" Eugene O'Neill faces and unveils his ghosts. He puts them on stage, in front of us, in front of himself. It’s a ghost scene pulled out of the past, a past that can’t be forgotten because as Mary says … “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.”

The characters of the play are ghosts of the living, living in their own past and the past of the only ghost present, the narrator and ghost of whom he used to be. Each and one of them, complex individuals caught in a web of love and resentment, choosing to slide back into the fog, into their own addictions, to cope with their bitterness and loneliness.

The Tyrons are a family trapped in time, in a prison of the past, and Eugene O’Neil waited, almost his entire life, to see through the fog and confront the memories that haunted him and them.

He does this by talking to his ghosts, seeing through each character, looking at their individual isolation. 

From the distance, only afforded by time, he takes us and himself on this painful journey back in to the past, back into the fog.

   

                          

“… I really love the 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.” (Mary)

As Harold Bloom, in Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretation, states, "... the consciousness of the playwright broods over the play ... his suffering is more real than that of his characters ..."; and as voyerist's, one senses his being and his suffering. O'Neill gives each member of his family a voice to exorcise their pain. He is the narrator and thus narrates their, and his own, pain. Even Edmund, his dead brother, is given a voice and body, his, while Eugene fades into being the ghost of his ghost.

"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 a 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." (Edmund)

Though Edmund is the one who listens with resignation, it's Eugene's voice who talks and sees the sad beauty in the motives underlying their behavior. He now understands the torment of human existence and comprehends his ghost's desire to escape from reality.

The play is in itself a journey, from a superficial image into the depth, from light to dark. 

The fog has blurred the limits and broken through the fourth wall, we are in the private family memory , the intimate one, witnessing their dynamics and demons, their individual egos. The antagonist has taken the stage and the scenario is becoming uncomfortable in its inner conflict. We identify with forgotten feelings and get dragged, with the Tyron’s, into blame and despair. 

The fog lifts, unveiling our own pain and suffering, we too remember being hurt by the cruelty of words said by those whom we loved most. Fiction has become real and we are exposed to their helplessness as to our own.

We are the ghosts of our past, addicted to their constant presence. During the play we are shown that the way to move beyond is by lifting the fog of our memories and facing the pain. O’Neill gifts us with his own revelation of freeing the ghosts by seeing the past in a different way; with the consciousness, awareness and compassion it takes, to be able to forgive … them and himself.